Standard Donation Forms

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

Create form

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

Designations

Donations are assigned to a specific designation that represents their financial purpose. To let donors choose from multiple designations, you can add more than one to a form in the Designations field and make a default selection in the Default designation field.

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

Tip: When you add multiple designations, you can rearrange them and add donor-friendly labels. Under Form, select Click to edit on the designation field on the form. Under Designation list, choose whether to use the default names or set new labels and change the order. When you choose select Set order, you are able to drag the designations to the order you want. For more information, see Designations.

Gift types

Every form needs at least one type of gift to accept, and both one-time and recurring are enabled by default. For more information, see Gift Options.

Campaign and appeal

To track fundraising initiatives, under Hidden fields, add a campaign and an appeal to the form. After the donor submits the form, this information appears in the contribution record. For more information, see Appeals .

Set payment processing and fee coverage

Standard Donation Forms connect to payment configurations in your Blackbaud Merchant Services account. Select the payment configuration under Process payments with.

Direct Debit

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

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.

Processing fee coverage choices

Enable recurring gift upsell

Use this option to encourage one-time donors to give monthly recurring gifts. It displays as a prompt when donors choose a one-time gift.

Under Fundraising opportunities, select Enable recurring gift upsells for one-time gifts. For more information, see Recurring Gift Upsell

 Recurring gift upsell prompt

Edit form fields and style

Form designer

To modify 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.

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.

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.

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:

  • Make anonymous gifts.

  • Enter gift comments.

  • Give gifts from their businesses.

  • Give in honor or memory of someone.

  • Choose the communications they want to receive.

For more information, see Fields.

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 not configurable, but you can remove it from the form.

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, this page and its content appear. Its intent is to thank donors for their donations and confirm that their donations were successful. If you choose to use the default content selection, it contains the donor's name and their gift amount. If you choose to redirect donors to a webpage on your organization's website, you can include calls to action.

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.

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.

Send receipts

If you use Raiser's Edge NXT receipt management, you can enable emailed receipts. After approving donations in a gift batch in Raiser's Edge NXT, receipts automatically send to donors.

  1. Under Receipt, select which gift types you want to enable receipts for.

  2. Select an email receipt template for each gift type. For more information, see Raiser's Edge NXT - Email receipt templates.

  3. Select a receipt series for the receipts. For more information, see Raiser's Edge NXT - Receipt series.

Test form

After configuring the form, you should test it to make sure it's easy for donors to use. To test it, the payment configuration in the Process payments with field under Get started, Payment processing, should be in test mode.

Tip: Manage an account's processing mode from the Blackbaud Merchant Services Web Portal. For more information, see Account Configurations in Blackbaud Merchant Services Help.

To test the form:

  1. Select the form from All donation forms, under Related Links.

  2. Under Publish, select how you want to test the form — from its URL, QR code, or embedded on a webpage. For more information, see Publish form.

  3. Review the form in a browser and use a test card number to submit a payment. For more information, see Test Credit Card and Direct Debit Transactions.

  4. Make adjustments to the form as necessary and save the form.

Accept donations

After testing the form and making adjustments, you are ready to use it to accept donations. If the payment configuration is in test mode, don't forget to change it to a live one.

  1. Select the form from All donation forms, under Related Links.

  2. Select Edit form.

  3. Under Payment processing, Process payments with, select a live payment configuration.

  4. Select Save and close.

Note: To help Blackbaud improve the online payment experience, an optional survey for donors periodically displays after they check out through your donation forms. It is turned on by default. For example, we may ask the donor how easy they found the checkout process or if they have suggestions to improve the experience. To turn it off, go to the Blackbaud Merchant Services Web Portal. From Control panel, Settings, edit an account configuration. Under Checkout survey, clear the option and save. It may take up to 24 hours for the survey to no longer appear on checkout.

Publish form

When you are ready to share the form with the public, you can embed it on a webpage, publish its URL, and download its QR code.

Tip: You can also follow these steps when testing your form with a payment configuration in test mode.

Select the form from All donation forms under Related Links. Next, select Publish.

When you embed donation forms on your organization's website, it helps build trust and increase donor conversions.

The code you copy contains a <div id> tag to identify which form displays, and the <script> tag contains the JavaScript that displays the form. After you embed the code, all edits you make to the form automatically update the embedded content. Do not make any changes directly to the code.

To embed a form, select Copy code under Embed form. Next, paste the code in the body of a webpage.

Warning: For security reasons, most email clients do not support JavaScript in their messages, therefore pasting the HTML into a message isn't recommended.

If you are unable to embed a form on a webpage, you can direct donors to the form using its Blackbaud-hosted URL. Under Hosted URL, select Copy URL. Next, add the URL to emails and other materials.

To direct donors to a form from printed materials, select Download QR code under Hosted URL. Next, add the QR code to printed materials, such as brochures and posters.

When there are too many designations to add to the form or you would like to pass a campaign and appeal through a form, you can set these parameters in the form's hyperlink. For more information, see Parameters.