Since the beginning, Legacy RaiseDonors has required an email address for every donor. Since Legacy RaiseDonors is focused in the "digital" fundraising space, we thought it made sense to always require an email address for donors. As time has progressed, we see the flaw(s) in that logic. So we have decided to venture forward and have road-mapped the following features.
1) Donors and donations do not require an email address
2) Email address is not the only key used to match donations to donors
Those features are on the road-map, meaning they aren't in place right now. But we wanted to share them so that you know that we understand!
So how does it work today?
Every donation and donor is required to have an email address. The email address attached to an incoming donation is the "key" used to match to an existing donor. If the incoming donation and an existing donor have the same email address, then the incoming donation is attributed to that donor. Legacy RaiseDonors will assume the billing information in the incoming donation is the most current and accurate, so it will overwrite the billing address on the donor record. If no donor is located, a new donor will be created in Legacy RaiseDonors.
This is why it's crucially important that if you are importing data, or if you are manually creating recurring schedules outside of Legacy RaiseDonors, or if you are collecting donations for donors that do not have an email address - that the email used is unique or tied to a specific donor.
Here's what you don't want to do. You do not want to use "no-email@{your-org}.org" for every donor that doesn't have an email address. Doing this will cause a ripple effect of problems. For instance, Donor A doesn't have an email address, so you make up an email address. All of that donor's billing and contact information is tied to the random email address just used. Later, (days or weeks), you use the same "random" email address for a different donor. Now donor A's information is overwritten by this other/new donor's information. In essence, you have vaporized donor A from the system. If you continue to use the same "random" email address, you will continue to overwrite the donors information, losing any reference to the previous donor.
To prevent this situation from occurring, Legacy RaiseDonors has two ways to automate the creation of random email addresses that should always be unique.
1) When using the Virtual Terminal.
2) Custom Javascript snippets.
Stay tuned for when we roll out the road-map features discussed above, we are excited to be working on those and rolling them out soon!