Get Started with Standard Donation Forms

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

Create form

From Online Giving, Overview select New donation form. Next, select Standard form. Under Get started enter a name for the form.

Set gift types

Every form must have at least one type of gift to accept. All gift types are enabled by default. You can configure the gift types under Form.

Set designations

Donations are assigned to a specific designation that represents their financial purpose. Select the designations for the form under Designations.

• To let donors choose from multiple designations, you can add more than one to the form.

  Tip: You can change the designations labels and the order they display under Form.

• To enable a default designation that is already chosen on the form, select the designation under Default designation.

• To let donors split their gift between more than one designation, select Enable donors to split gifts between designations.

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

Enable Intelligent Ask on Standard Donation Forms helps increase the average gift amount for your organization by presenting personalized one-time gift amounts to anonymous donors. Blackbaud's data model adjusts the one-time gifts amounts you configure on a form to display the amounts a donor is most likely to give. It uses a combination of data such as the device and browser accessing the form to determine those amounts per donor.

To turn it on, select Intelligent Ask, under Fundraising opportunities.

Enable recurring gift upsell

To encourage donors who give a one-time gift to give monthly, enable Enable Recurring Gift Upsell for Donation Forms. It displays as a prompt when donors choose a one-time gift. Under Fundraising opportunities, select Recurring gift upsell.

Set an appeal

To track fundraising initiatives, under Hidden fields, add an appeal to the form. After the donor submits the form, this information appears in their gift record.

Set gift processing

Standard Forms connect 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 Payment and fees, 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. For more information, see Fee Coverage.

Edit gift types, form fields, and style

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

Gift amounts, layout, and configuration

To change the layout of the gift amounts and configure recurring gifts, 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 donors trust your form, it's a good idea to include your logo and mission statement. This is helpful when you are unable to embed the form on a webpage.

Additional Fields

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

• Enter gift comments.

• Enter their phone number.

Review and edit confirmations

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

Thank you message

After a donor submits the form, the thank you message and its content appear in the browser. Its intent is to thank the donor 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 donors to a webpage, you can include your own content without the transaction information.

Social sharing

Thank you email

After a donor 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: This email is not a receipt. To issue receipts use your CRM system or 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 for Donation Forms.

Send staff 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.