Create a Donation Form

Note: The full requirements of PCI 4.0 were enforced March 31, 2025. Your organization has its own PCI audit date to comply with those requirements. To ensure your organization is ready, update all of your payment forms before your PCI audit date. To ensure Blackbaud's compliance before Blackbaud's audit, we ran an Auto-Compliance Migration Script from May 1-16th to enforce updated payment processing. The script updated all unchanged forms with the checkout modal, potentially causing layout and processing changes. This script cannot update API forms, which you must manually update. See Auto Migration FAQs.

Warning: All credit and debit card transactions must use the new checkout by March 2025 to meet Payment Card Industry standards. Configure your active, new, and recurring card payment forms with checkout to meet PCI standards before March 2025.

Each donation form must be associated with a donation campaign. The campaign must be created before the form and can contain multiple forms.

Tip: New eLearnings for checkout are available now! See Level Up with Luminate Online.

Warning: When you select the Checkout merchant account for a campaign, you must also add a checkout data element to all active forms in that campaign. Donation forms are linked to the merchant account specified in the donation campaign. When you select the Checkout merchant account for a campaign, all donation forms in that campaign are automatically linked to that Checkout merchant account. Add the Checkout data element to all donation forms in your campaign prior to changing your campaign merchant account.

Tip: Test new settings by copying an existing campaign with its forms and applying the new merchant account and data elements in the copy. If you are unsatisfied with the results, you can delete the copy without losing your original campaign and form settings.

Choose form name and template

1. Select Fundraising and Donation Management.

2. Find your campaign in the Campaigns list and select Manage. If you have not created your campaign, see the Create a Campaign tutorial.

   Warning: Add the Checkout data element to all active forms in your campaign before changing the merchant account. Donation forms are linked to the merchant account specified in the donation campaign. When you select the checkout merchant account for a campaign, all donation forms in that campaign are automatically linked to that checkout merchant account. Do not remove the Payment Type data element. Include both the Payment Type and either the Checkout Modal or Checkout Embedded data elements.

3. Select Create a Donation Form.

4. Enter a form name and select Next.

5. Select a form template. Form templates are default data element layouts. All data elements can be added to or removed from any of these templates. Preview templates and Select the one closest to your desired outcome. For this tutorial we will select the Basic Donation Form.

Identify the form

1. Enter an internal form name, [Optional] public form name, and [Optional] description. The internal name and description is for the benefit of your staff when searching for and reporting on forms. These are not displayed to your audience.

2. Select a security category to control permission to edit and manage the form.

Add donors to a constituent group

[Optional] To add all donors using this form to a constituent group, choose Select. You may select an existing group or create a new group. By default, donors are not added to a group.

• Add constituents to an existing group

  1. Select a group.

  2. Select Apply.

• Add constituents to new group -

  1. Enter a Group Name to distinguish it from other groups.

  2. Choose or create a Group Type to associate this group with other similar ones that already exist.

  3. Enter a Group Description to describe the reason for the group or its purpose.

  4. Optionally set a Group Security Mode to give members of the group a set of permissions assigned to the chosen group.

  5. Select Apply.

Designate your gift

[Optional] Designated giving allows donors to direct their funds to specific causes and areas within a fundraising mission. For example, a school fundraiser may allow donors to designate funds to the art, music, or STEM departments. A hospital fundraiser may allow donors to designate funds to the pediatrics or cancer ward. Likewise, you can design donation forms for specific causes within the mission. If this donation is intended for a specific cause within the overall fundraising campaign, select a designee.

Configure form interaction settings

1. Select if the form will be available for donations online, offline, or both.

   Note: The Checkout Modal in the 24.4 release does not include options for donors to select check or cash payments. This is coming in the 24.5 release in Nov 2024 as well as many other features and enhancements.

   Warning: Do not remove the Payment Type data element. Include both the Payment Type and either the Checkout Modal or Checkout Embedded data elements. Note that the CVV field is required for offline credit and debit card donations with the new data elements. See the Checkout FAQ for more details.

2. Select a responsive layout to allow the form to adjust the display to the user's screen size.

3. [Optional] If you want to track how new constituents are interacting with your form, enter a source, and possibly subsource, code.

4. Select Yes, enforce verification on all API donation requests to this form to require field level validation during API donation form processing such as with the donate or addOfflineDonation methods.

   Warning: Do not select this setting if you plan to use API integrations, such as TeamRaiser Facebook integration, that may need to bypass this validation.

Configure donation levels

[Optional] Donation Levels allow you to create specific and personalized donation requests and to assign different conditions and rewards to those amounts.

• Create giving tiers with specific thresholds. For example, a Bronze donation level maybe amounts between $20 and $50, Silver between $50 and $100, and Gold anything over $100.

• Create a Dynamic Ask to calculate a suggested donation based on a constituent's giving history.

• Associate levels with premiums, memberships, or other perks.

To create a new donation level:

1. Select Create a Donation Level.

2. Name the donation level.

3. Select if the donation level requirement is a fixed amount, minimum amount, or Dynamic Ask.

4. Enter the fair market value of goods or services, if any, that you are providing to constituents who donate at this level. This amount will be subtracted from the gift amount to yield the tax-deductible portion of the donation. Do not include the value of premiums as these are handled separately.

5. Select a security category.

6. If desired, assign a promotion code. If a promotion code is assigned, the donation level is only available to donors who enter the code.

7. If desired, select a group to which donors at this level will be added.

8. If desired, select a product to associate as a premium. To add an existing product as a premium, under Related Actions, select Manage Premium Associations. If the product does not yet exist in your system, select Create a New Product.

   Note: Premiums aren't available on levels where donors enter their own amount. However, a donor who enters an amount equal to or greater than a fixed giving level is offered premiums associated with that level.

9. If desired, select Yes, I would like to offer membership benefits for this level. See Membership Types to learn more about this feature.

   Only available if your site is has Memberships configured.

10. Save the level.

Note: Donation levels must be published to be added to be added to a donation form.

Design donation form

Now it is time to Design Donor Screens. When you began to think about creating a donation form, this is the step you probably had in mind. What will the form look like? What payment types will we accept for this form? What message should we use to encourage recurring giving? There are a huge number of options available to you and you can learn more about each under Donor Screens and Data Elements. Here we will walk through setting up a basic, standard form with a checkout modal data element.

1. Select Edit Donation Form.

2. Select the Checkout Modal data element under Select data elements to include in this form and Add.

3. Use the up and down ORDER arrows to move the element where it belongs on the page, and select Save Order and Edit Selected.

   Note: For the 24.4 release, we recommend placing the Checkout Modal element on the last page of the donation form.

4. Configure element settings under Edit Data Element, select Preview Data Element to ensure it looks as expected, and select Finish.

   Most data elements have help pages.  See the Checkout Modal page as an example.

Validate your form

If your form does not pass validation, problems and steps to resolve them will be displayed.

Configure autoresponders

[Optional] Your donors will be automatically contacted by email when certain events happen. Some examples are thank you messages after donations are submitted, notifications of upcoming, recurring payments. You may used the default messages or Edit the autoresponder emails.

Test drive your form

[Optional] Test the form with a variety of constituent profiles, devices, browsers, light modes, and digital accessibility tools. Select Test to send an email with a link to the form to reviewers. Separate recipient email addresses with commas.

Publish your form

1. Select when to publish and [Optional] unpublish the form.

2. [Optional] Enter a website URL to redirect visitors who try to open the form after it has been unpublished.

3. Note the donation form URL. Select the URL to view the page or copy the URL to share with others.

4. [Optional] Use the provided code to add a donate button to digital resources. When clicked, this button will open the donation form.

   1. Copy the first snippet and past it between the <head></head> HTML tags in your email or website code.

   2. Copy the second snippet and past it between the <body></body> HTML tags in your email or website code where you want the button to appear.

5. Select Finish.