Get Started with Membership Forms

Note: This feature is currently undergoing an Early Adopter Program and not generally available. Expect its wider release to be included in a future update.

Membership forms are customizable forms to increase both the number of memberships to your organization and the revenue from memberships.

Create Form

  1. From Online Giving, Membership forms, select New membership form.

  2. Under Get started, enter a descriptive name for the form in Form name.

Enable Gifts of Memberships

  1. Select Enable gift of membership if you want to allow those who fill out the form to purchase a membership as a gift for someone else.

  2. Select Enable additional donations if you want to enable additional donations beyond the membership in the form.

    1. Under Designation, select a designation that the additional donations will apply to.

Set Memberships

  1. Under Memberships, select Memberships to see the list of memberships in your database.

  2. Select the ones you want to include on the form.

Set Campaign, Appeals, and Constituent Codes

Optionally, from Hidden fields, you can add a campaign and appeal to the membership record or add a constituent code to the member's record and the gifted membership recipient's record after the form is submitted. These fields don’t display on the membership form for the supporter to see.

Configure Payments and Fees

  1. Under Payment processing, enter the payment configuration for processing payments. For more information, see < >

  2. 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, select either:

    1. Test mode without creating gift or membership records, to test the form without creating gift or membership records, or

    2. Test mode and create one-time gift records and membership records, to create one-time gift test records while testing the form.

    3. Warning: Only select Start processing donations 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.

  3. Under Processing fees, configure the form so your donors, Blackbaud, or your organization covers the online transaction fees. For more information, see Fee Coverage.

  4. Select Next.

Configure Memberships

  1. From Form, on Memberships, select Click to edit to configure how each membership. You can modify how each membership's title is displayed on the form and its description. You also must select a Designation for each membership on the form. You can adjust the dues and additional members here.

  2. Drag and drop the memberships to reorder them.

  3. Under Labels, you can edit the name of the select membership button and the “You’ve selected” text.

  4. Select Done.

Configure Member and Billing Labels

You can change the field labels on any of the primary member fields, additional gift fields, and billing information fields by selecting Click to edit on the field name, making the changes, and selecting Done.

Add Fields the Form

You can move additional fields from the Form designer to the form to capture additional information, such as billing contact phone, consent options, gift aid, and gift comments.

Style the membership form

Now that you added the fields and content components to the form, it's ready for you to make consistent style changes that reflect your organization's branding.

Review and Edit Confirmations

Under Confirmations, you can configure what happens after donors make their donation.

Thank You Message

After a member submits the form, the thank you message and its content appear in the browser. Its intent is to thank the member and confirm that their membership was successful.

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

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

Thank You Email

After the member submits the form, the thank you email is sent to confirm their membership with transaction details. You can change the default content of the email, edit the subject line, and reply-to and from names and email addresses.

Send Staff Notifications

To notify staff when memberships are submitted through the form, enter up to 10 email addresses under Confirmations, Donation notification.

If you don't want to notify staff for every membership 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 memberships equal to or greater than $100.

Select Save and close.