In Blackbaud Internet Solutions, you can use the Donation Form part and the Advanced Donation Form (ADF) part to accept online donations. The Advanced Donation Form part was developed in response to customer feedback to provide a more flexible donation form. Refer to these FAQs for answers to the most common questions.
Both the Donation Form and Advanced Donation Forms share many common donation form features. Both forms allow one-time or recurring donations, allow users to select from giving levels, and push online donations down into a Blackbaud CRM Enhanced Revenue Batch.
We received feedback from customers that the original Donation Form part was too strict in its design. Customers wanted to design their own donation experience. In order to reorder fields, change captions, or change the design of the form, you had to use JavaScript or jQuery to alter the behavior of the form. Based on discovery feedback, the Advanced Donation Form was created and released.
The Advanced Donation Form was created to be a form for developers. It uses an API, with set endpoints (fields), to capture donation, donor, and payment information and send that to Blackbaud CRM. The standard Donation Form has a lot of point-and-click configuration, so it is easy for non-technical staff to set up a donation form. The ADF has very little point and click configuration. Most of the configuration lies in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code that is written directly into the part. An ADF is not typically easy or quick to set up, unlike the standard Donation Form. While there are some functional differences between the ADF and the standard Donation Form, the largest difference lies in flexibility in the overall look and feel of the form and how the form is created.
ADF is meant to offer the most commonly-used features. For more information, refer to Feature Comparison.
While anyone can create an Advanced Donation Form part, we recommend that you leave this to a developer. A solid knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is required to build out the donation form of your dreams. If you want a customised form design, but do not have developers on staff, Blackbaud Services can design and build a form for you on a time and materials basis.
The first step in determining which form works better for you is establishing your overall online donation strategy. How do you guide people to your donation forms? How many donation forms do you have? What are the differences between them?
After you have a good strategy, determine what your requirements are for each form. Are you only allowing recurring gifts to be entered on a specific form? Do you have one form that handles all giving needs? Compare these requirements to the Feature Comparison chart (linked to above) to determine the form that works best for you.
If you want to build a unique donation experience with the Advanced Donation Form, but it does not handle all of your feature requirements, assess the impact of not having the feature. For example, if one of your requirements is to capture spouse name information, how many of your donors input this information on your current form? If joint gifts and spouse information is put into the Comments field, how much extra work does that cause your gift administrators? Can you separate out those donors through your site user experience and use a standard Donation Form for only those instances?
Blackbaud has a long term goal to bring feature parity to the ADF. Until then, features and functions must be weighted carefully with design aesthetics to determine if using an ADF is right for you.
Once you have determined that your requirements fit the Advanced Donation Form, it is time for the fun part—designing the user interface. The only visual requirement of an ADF is that it must use the Blackbaud secure payment web page to capture billing information as the last step of your form. The best way to design your form is first to look at your competitors and other organisations like you, and then build out a wireframe that lays out the functions of the form. By getting internal signoff on the wireframe first, you lessen the amount of coding changes that need to be made once you build the form.
Because the design and markup of the form is completely up to you, it is up to your developers to code the ADF to be responsive. Blackbaud Internet Solutions layouts and templates can be made responsive. By adding a responsive ADF form, your donation form would then be considered responsive.
You add designations within the code by referencing their GUID. You can also pull a collection or group of GUIDs by creating a query resulting in the designations you want and adding the query GUID into the ADF to pull your designations. The GUID can be obtained via SQL (if you have access to SQL) or by creating a query with your designations as the query result and including the Systems Record ID field in your query output.
To include multiple designations, create a query with your designation filter criteria. (Tip: Many customers use tags or attributes to mark their designations for online use, and then query off of that criteria.) Use the query GUID instead of the designation GUID to pull in the designations from your query results.
Designation hierarchies (also known as cascading fund drop downs) must be created with custom code and JavaScript.
Because of the custom code each customer can build into the Advanced Donation Form, the Advanced Donation Form is considered a customisation that requires a level of developer expertise to be enhanced or modified. While our Support analysts can answer high-level questions about built in functionality of the Advanced Donation Form, they cannot help you code it or troubleshoot your custom code. We recommend that you review our Developer Guide and code samples for the Advanced Donation Form. Alternatively, our Professional Services team can offer consulting and build support for an additional cost. You can also use the discussion forums on the Blackbaud Developer Network to ask your peers.
Just like the standard Donation Form, donations made through ADF pass finder number and other email identifiers to Blackbaud CRM revenue records when they initiate their ADF donation through an email sent from Blackbaud CRM (finder number + referring email information) and Blackbaud Internet Solutions (referring email information).
In order to be able to update sample code more proactively than product releases allow, sample code for the Advanced Donation Form lives on the BBIS Developer Network. We encourage customer developers to also share their own code with their peers through the Github repository on the site.