Before we jump into creating a Giving Form, let’s take a look at a live example. This donation page has a clear and inviting donation button. When we click to donate, the Giving Form opens full screen on the page for a user-friendly donation process. The popup form is suggested for most use cases, but you can also embed the form directly into your page layout.
In another lesson, we’ll walk through the entire donation flow from your donor’s perspective; today we’re going to start inside Funraise’s platform and create a form just like the one you see here.
Here you see helpful information for each form, including the amount raised through the form, the count of donors, the count of one-time and recurring transactions, and the goal progress.
In the actions menu at the right of each row, click to edit or archive a Giving Form.
And of course, at the top of the page, you can click to create a new Giving Form.
The form editor has three tabs: Settings, Design, and Publish.
Ok! Let’s start with Settings. In the Settings tab, there are several pages of configurations. First up is General, where you can edit the overall settings for this form.
Next, in Contact Information, make the phone number and physical address fields hidden, optional, or required for your donors.
If you choose to allow institution contacts, your donor will be able to declare that the donation is from an institution, as well as select the institution type and enter the institution name.
Next, Tags. When tags are added to a Giving Form, they’ll be automatically applied to any Supporters or Transactions passing through this form. Tags are very helpful as they can be used to create filtered lists of Supporters or Transactions. To add tags, just enter a hash symbol followed by the tag… add multiple tags if you like.
Google reCAPTCHA is a tool used to mitigate transaction fraud, a common issue for nonprofit donation forms. There are several methods Funraise uses to mitigate fraud on your forms, but we highly recommend enabling Google reCAPTCHA.
Each Giving Form has a checkbox to collect positive marketing consent from your donors. This is required in many locations. While this checkbox cannot be removed, you can default the marketing consent checkbox to true or checked.
Finally, you can edit the form version in the General section. In nearly all cases, your forms should be set to Version 2. Form Version 1 is a legacy form and deprecated version that does not have advanced features like ticketing or Apple Pay.
Now, let’s click into the Tickets section. Here you can add tickets to your Giving Form. Just click “Add Ticket” to search and select the tickets you’d like to add. After your tickets are added to the list, you can change the order the tickets display on the form.
Tickets are a component of Funraise’s Event feature, which we’ll cover in depth in another lesson.
When you add tickets to the form, a few things happen…
First, the tickets are added to the first page of the form. Second, you can choose to show an additional donation ask after your guest has selected their tickets. If you add a donation ask to a ticket form, it will be optional for your donors.
Questions! To add a custom question to the form, click “Add Question”. Search and select an existing question or create a new question.
Questions are great if you need to collect additional information from a donor, like their t-shirt size. Just like tickets, you can change the order that your questions are displayed on the form.
Moving on to Payments—probably the most important settings for your form!
The Ask Amount represents your donation amount options. In almost all cases, you’ll use a suggested ask type which allows you to customize 4 amount buttons. You can also default the amount that the form opens with by clicking prefill.
If you need to collect a single amount as a payment or membership fee, select the required ask amount type and enter the specific amount. Now this will be the only amount available on your donation form.
Activate as many payment methods as needed: including card, eCheck, bitcoin, Apple Pay, and Paypal. The Payment methods available in your account are based on the gateways you’ve added. Consult our documentation to learn more about gateways and payment methods.
Because PayPal donations are finalized on PayPal’s website, the PayPal redirect is the url that we will redirect your donors to after they successfully complete their donation on PayPal.
Next: Frequency. You can allow your donors to select a frequency for their donation. Recurring giving is a very effective tool to increase revenue—if you don’t have a monthly donor program, we highly suggest you start one. We recommend always including a one-time and monthly option. Other strategies may call for Weekly, Quarterly, or Yearly.
Transaction Options are additional fields you can choose to show or hide.
With Dedications, your donors can dedicate their gift to a loved one or someone who inspired their donation. Your donor will be able to select a dedication type and enter a name, email address, and message. If a dedication email address is provided, we’ll send an email with details about this dedication to the dedicatee.
If you allow donors to give anonymously, they can choose to hide their name from public donation feeds on Campaign Sites. We suggest always allowing for anonymous donations—your team will still be able to view the donor’s name and contact details in the backend.
Donors can also leave a comment with their donation.
To use Company Match, you’ll need to activate the Double the Donation integration. Thousands of companies match their employees' donations, so by enabling company match, you can collect match information from donors and begin the matching process right from the donation—this is a revenue booster and timesaver.
We cover Allocations in another course, so we won’t explain them in detail in this lesson. Here you can add one or many allocations to the form. You can also change the order of the allocations selection list.
Next, let’s look at the donation receipt sent by email. Each Giving Form has its own receipt template. Click to preview your receipt template, which includes important information like donation details, organization name, organization id number, and address.
Time to talk about items you can customize on the receipt…
This is advanced, but you can do it! Insert data merge tags to personalize your donation receipt. For example, add a donor's name or details about their donation into the email body. Consult our documentation to see all the merge tags available.
Click Design in the top bar to open your design options.
Here you’ll see editable items on the left and a design preview on the right. The design preview isn’t actually your live form—it’s just a default view to preview your design edits.
Give your form a headline that will appear with the popup version of the form. If you don’t want a headline, just leave this field blank.
Next: colors for your form.
You can edit the popup background color, headline color, button color and button text color. We suggest a dark background with your primary brand color for the button.
Add a logo to your form—A consistent brand experience is a big part of encouraging donor trust online.
Now that the form’s configured with the desired settings and design, it’s time to publish the form on your website.
Because this is a new form, you need to click “Create Form” to create a form with all of these settings.... Once it’s created we’ll be able to access the form code.
On the publish page, you’ll see a few options. The button launcher allows you to embed a button on your site that will launch a popup form—this is the recommended option in most cases.
The placed form option will allow you to embed the form directly in your page layout.
To embed a form, you must copy each element of the form code and place it into your website.
In another lesson, we’ll talk in detail about how to embed your Giving Forms. In most cases, you need to share this code with your web developer.
