Get Started with Standard Donation Forms

Standard Donation Forms are customizable forms you create to help raise money for your organization.

Before you build a donation form, review the prerequisites.

To create the form, open Online Giving, and select Overview or Donation forms. Next, select New form and choose Standard form.

Get Started

Get started defines the form's identity and sets up the core fundraising options for supporters.

  1. Under Form name, enter a descriptive name for the form.

  2. Every form must have at least one gift type to accept. All gift types are enabled by default. You can configure the gift types further, such as editing gift amounts or changing the gift layout from horizontal to vertical under Form.

Set Designations

Under Designations, select the designations for the form. Donations are assigned to a designation that represents their financial purpose. A form must have at least one designation.

Note: In Raiser's Edge NXT, designations are known as funds. For more information, see Funds.

When you select more than one designation for the form, supporters can choose which ones to support. You can also:

  • Set a default designation that's already selected on the form, under Default designation.

  • Let supporters split their gift between more than one designation when you select Enable donors to split gifts between designations.

  • Let supporters enter their own write-in designations, when you select Enable donors to add their own designations.

  • You can change the designation labels and the order they display under Form.

Tip: At least one designation is required on a donation form, but you can pass designations through the form's URL. To learn more, see Fundraising Parameter Hyperlinks.

Enable Intelligent Ask

Intelligent Ask increases the average one-time gift amount to help you raise more for your organization by presenting personalized one-time gift amounts to unknown donors. To use this option, your donation form must process payments with Blackbaud Merchant Services, and it is enabled on donation forms by default. For example, if the first amount on a donation form's ask ladder is $50, it may adjust to $60 for a donor.

Enable Recurring Gift Upsell

Recurring gift upsell encourages donors to give monthly recurring gifts. To use this option, your donation form must include one-time gifts and process payments with Blackbaud Merchant Services. It is enabled by default on donation forms.

Tip: You can view the projected recurring gift total and percentage of donors who converted their one-time gift to a recurring gift. From Online Giving, select Overview.

Select Next.

Payment and Fees

Payment and fees connects the form to a payment configuration and determines how to handle online transaction fees. You also set whether the form processes test or live transactions.

Set Gift Processing

To process transactions, the form connects to a live payment configuration in your organization's Blackbaud Merchant Services account.

  • If you have one Blackbaud Merchant Services account with only one payment configuration, the form automatically connects to that configuration.

  • If you have multiple accounts or payment configurations, you can select a payment configuration under Gift processing.

Direct Debit

To enable donors to give one-time and recurring gifts using direct debit, select Enable direct debit, under Gift processing.

Set Transaction Processing

After you configure the form, you can test it to ensure it's easy to use and not confusing to donors. By default, the form is in test mode. Under Transaction processing, you can choose to create one-time gift test records while testing it. Test mode doesn't support recurring gift test records.

Warning: Only select Start processing donations now after testing the form because you can't switch the form back to test mode or use test credit card numbers. However, when you copy a form, the copy is automatically in test mode.

Set Fee Coverage

To bring more revenue to your mission, configure the form so your donors or Blackbaud covers the online transaction fees. Under Fee coverage, select how your organization will cover fees for donations given through this form.

Select Next.

Form

To gather more information from supporters and change the look and feel of the form, add, configure, remove, and style fields, such as headers and gift options, under Form.

Edit Gift Amounts, Layout, and Configuration

To change the layout of the gift amounts and configure recurring gifts and pledges, under Form, select Click to edit from the gift amounts.

Designations Labels and Order

If you add multiple designations to a form, you can change the designations label and names. Under Form, select the designations on the form.

  • To change the field label, change the text in the Designation label field.

  • To change the designation names, under Designations list, select Set labels. Change the text under Display name for each designation.

    Note: You can also change the sort order, whether you want to manually set the order with the Set order option or sort alphabetically.

Branding

To help supporters trust your form, it's a good idea to include your logo and mission statement. This is helpful when you can't embed the form on a webpage.

To add a logo to your form, select Content in the Form designer. Next, select and drag Image to a location on the form. Then choose the image.

Tip: Images should be less than 2 MB.

To add a mission statement, select Content in the Form designer. Next, select and drag Text only to a location on the form. Then add the mission statement.

To match colors and fonts to your organization's branding, select Style in the Form designer. Next, select each form section and update styles as necessary.

More Fields

When editing your form, you can collect more information from supporters. Select and drag different fields from the Form designer to the form. These include letting supporters:

To make changes to a field or button, such as changing the gift amounts, select Click to edit on the field on the form.

Note: Address is required on a standard donation form and isn't configurable. However, you can remove it from the form

Select Next.

Confirmations

Under Confirmations, you control what supporters see and receive after they submit the form.

Set Thank You Message

After a supporter submits the form, the thank you message appears to thank them and confirm that their gift was successful.

  • If you choose the default content selection, the thank you message includes the transaction information.

  • If you choose to redirect supporters to a webpage, you can include your own content without the transaction information.

Enable Social Sharing

If you select Use default content, under Thank you message, you can enable social sharing to encourage donors to share their support of your organization with their friends. The form must be embedded on your website for the social sharing options to appear.

To enable social sharing, select Display social sharing options under Social sharing.

After making their donation, a donor can quickly share the form with Facebook and WhatsApp. To share with other platforms, such as LinkedIn, donors can select Copy link and paste it in their message.

If a donor's device or browser supports native sharing, they may see More share options. By selecting this option donors can share the form quickly and directly via text messages, AirDrop (for Apple devices), or email without copying the link.

Set Closed Form Message, Date, and Time

Instead of manually unpublishing the form or deleting it, you can automatically close the form when you choose. Select Automatically close form, then set when you want the form to close and configure the message with a call to action you would like supporters to take.

Edit Thank You Email

After a supporter submits the form, the email is sent to confirm their donation with transaction details. The email contains a default message and personalization. You can edit the subject line, the message, and reply-to and from names and email addresses.

Warning: The Thank you email is not a receipt. To issue receipts use Gift Receipting or your current receipt workflow.

To edit the email message:

  1. From Confirmations, select Open email designer.

  2. Hover over the message, and select Edit.

  3. In the text editor, make any changes you need.

  4. To make personalized changes, select Merge, Donation Forms, and choose the fields you want to add.

  5. Select Apply.

Tip: If you update the content of the email, you can re-insert merge fields, such as transaction details, from Merge, Donation Forms in the text field.

To learn how to design your email, see Thank You Email Tutorial.

Enable Internal Notifications

To notify staff when donors submit gifts through the form, enter up to 10 email addresses under Confirmations, Donation notification. In addition, if you don't want to notify staff for every donation made through the form, you can set the minimum gift amount. For example, set the amount to $100, and notifications will only be sent for donations equal to or greater than $100.

Send Receipts

If you use gift receipting in Raiser's Edge NXT, you can choose how supporters receive receipts after their payment.

Hidden Fields

Under Hidden fields, you can add tracking information to the form. This information doesn't appear on the supporter-facing form, but it does appear on the gift record after the form is submitted.

  • To track fundraising initiatives, from Hidden fields, select a campaign, appeal, and package to the form. After the donor submits the form, this information appears in their gift record.

  • To further categorize gifts from the form for tracking and reporting purposes, from Hidden fields, select a gift subtype.

Save

Select Save and close to save the form in its current state. After you save the form, it appears in the donation forms list.

You can return to edit the form at any time. When you're ready to accept real transactions, edit the form and go to Payment and fees. Select Start processing donations now. After you select this option, you can no longer change the form back to test mode.

Next Steps

Your next steps are to test the form before you configure it to accept real transactions. After testing the form and configuring it to take transactions, publish it when you are ready.