One mistyped letter in “gmail” is enough to lose an online ticket buyer. The order goes through, the payment posts, and the eTicket goes to an address that doesn’t exist. Nobody knows until the guest shows up without a ticket, or until a renewal reminder bounces months later.
There are two ways to guard against this on an online form: ask people to type their email twice, or check the address as they type it. Below is what to look at in Altru’s online forms, what to do when the form can’t do either, and how to catch bad addresses that have already landed in your database.
Start by testing what your forms can actually do
Altru’s web forms (online ticketing, memberships, donations) give you a set of configurable fields, but they don’t give you full control over the form’s code. Whether you can add a second “confirm email” field and have the form require the two to match is not something we’d promise either way. Form options have changed over the years, and what’s possible can depend on how your forms are set up and on any custom HTML your web team has added around them.
The fastest way to find out:
- Open a test version of each form you use (ticketing, membership, donation) and look at the fields you’re allowed to add or require.
- If you can add a custom text field, add a “Confirm email” field and run a test purchase with two different addresses. Did the form stop you, or did it just save both values?
- Type an obviously broken address such as name@gmial with no “.com” and see whether the form rejects it.
- If the answers aren’t clear, ask Blackbaud support directly what email validation the forms do. Get the answer in writing so the next person on your team doesn’t repeat the test.
A confirm field that collects a second value without comparing the two doesn’t help much. It just gives you a second place to store the typo.
Confirm field or real-time check?
They catch different mistakes, so it helps to know which problem you’re solving.
- A matching “confirm email” field catches one-off slips, like a doubled letter or a missing character. It doesn’t catch the person who confidently types the wrong address twice, and many people copy and paste the first field into the second anyway.
- Format checking (is there an @, a domain, a dot) catches badly broken input. A browser can do this on its own, but it will happily accept jane@gmial.com.
- Real-time verification asks an outside service whether the domain accepts mail and, in some cases, whether the mailbox exists. Some services also suggest corrections (“Did you mean gmail.com?”). This catches the most errors, but it needs code on the form page and usually a paid verification service. That’s hard to add to a form you don’t control.
For ticket buyers, a “did you mean” suggestion for common domains does more good than a confirm field. For donors and members, either one helps, because those addresses get used for receipts and renewals for years.
Reduce the damage when a bad address gets through
Even with validation, some bad addresses will slip through. A few habits keep a typo from turning into a lost guest:
- Show the address back on the confirmation page. If your confirmation text can include the email the buyer entered, add a line like “Your tickets were sent to ___. Wrong address? Call us at ___.” Some people catch their own mistake right there.
- Let admissions look orders up by name. Make sure front-line staff know how to find an online order by the buyer’s name or phone number, so a missing eTicket doesn’t hold up the line.
- Watch your bounces. Whatever tool sends your eTickets and acknowledgments, someone should review hard bounces each week and fix or flag those constituent records in Altru.
Find the typos already in Altru
A simple constituent query will turn up most of the obvious ones. Filter email addresses for common misspelled domains and patterns, for example:
- gmial.com, gmal.com, gmail.co, gamil.com
- yahooo.com, yaho.com, hotmial.com, outlok.com
- Addresses ending in .con or .cm, or containing a space or a comma
Run it monthly. Fix the clear cases (gmial.com is almost always gmail.com) and mark the rest so they’re excluded from email lists until someone confirms the address. While you’re in the data, check whether the bad address created a separate constituent record. When the same person comes back with the correct address, you may now have two records for one person.
When the form itself is the limit
If testing shows you can’t add the validation you need to Altru’s web forms, the remaining option is to change the form. Social Good Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that replaces Altru web forms and writes the data back to Altru. If email validation is your main reason for looking, ask us to show you how the email field behaves before you decide.
Quick answers
Will the browser catch bad emails on its own?
Only badly broken ones, and only if the field is set up as an email field. It won’t catch a misspelled domain.
Is a confirm-email field worth adding if it doesn’t enforce a match?
Usually not. Without a comparison, it adds a step for buyers and two values for staff to sort out later.
