Let’s say you’re hosting an event and need to know a registrant’s t-shirt size and meal preference. Not only do you need a way to collect this information from each guest, you’ll also need to organize all your attendees' responses and send a report to your vendors so you have the correct amount of delish veggie and chicken dinners!
Because custom questions are entirely… um… custom, they’re a great way to collect allllll kinds of data and responses from supporters.
Access your Custom Questions from the side menu by clicking Supporters and then Answers. Even though you and I are talking about Custom Questions, this section is actually called Answers. Because that’s exactly what you’re looking at when you land on the section homepage.
Ahhh, the Answers section. Here, you’ll see a table of all the answers your supporters have submitted. You can filter and sort this table as needed.
Looking at the section header, here’s where you access your saved Lists, Questions, and create new Questions.
On the Questions page, you’ll see all of your master questions. These are the Questions that can be added to any Giving Form, ticket, or fundraiser sign up form. To edit a question, click its underlined name.
Now you get to choose an answer format:
Let’s add this question to a Giving Form. To do that, navigate to Giving Forms and select a form. On the settings page of the form editor, click Questions. Now, add one or two or 20 questions.
Clicking Add Question will open a list of master questions—search and select the one you just created.
Pro Tip! It’s worth noting that we could have created the example question here, just by clicking New Question on this flyout—next time, you won’t have to navigate between multiple sections to accomplish one task. Now you know!
After the question is added to the form, you can make this question required in order to successfully submit the form.
In this example, we’ve added a question to a giving form—which, in the case of donations, makes sense. But what if you wanted to add this question to a ticket instead?
First, let’s talk about why you’d want to add a question to a ticket instead of the overall form. Using the example of a gala event where you’re collecting meal preferences, you need to know the meal preference for each registration. When you add the question to a ticket, you can collect meal preferences for each ticket purchased, rather than just once per transaction.
Let’s put it to the test! Navigate to Tickets, which we can find in the Events section... Open a ticket profile and select Registrant Info. Here’s where you add a question to the ticket. Now, whenever this ticket appears on a form, this question will be included.
Every question a Supporter answers can be viewed on their Supporter profile. For example, open up a Supporter profile and click on Questions. Look! You can see all the historic answers from this Supporter.
Even better, you can edit your Supporter’s answer if they’ve changed their mind.
It’s also good to know that, if you added Custom Questions to a Giving Form, you’ll see the answers on a transaction profile. And likewise, if the question was added to a ticket, you’ll also see answers on the registration profile.
Let’s say you need to send a meal list to your gala venue. That’s easy. Just add a filter for that specific question.... Now, you’ve got a list of meal preferences for your upcoming event. You can save and export this list to send to your venue, making life sooo much easier!
