Classic Forms in DonorPerfect for Events Series

Good morning, or good afternoon, depending on where you are, it’s one o’clock for me outside of Philadelphia. Today we are going to get into the classic forms with DonorPerfect. So this is going to be our again, our classic forms product, not the Read More

Good morning, or good afternoon, depending on where you are, it’s one o’clock for me outside of Philadelphia. Today we are going to get into the classic forms with DonorPerfect. So this is going to be our again, our classic forms product, not the new drag and drop forms. So if that’s something that you were interested in learning about, we do have a new forms webinar that you can attend live, where you can catch one of our recorded versions of my name is Sean McClellan, also known as Mac, and I’m going to be your trainer for today. Before we get into the presentation proper, I want to cover a few housekeeping items. On your screen, you should see the sample webinar slide and somewhere on your screen, you should see the control panel. If you don’t see the control panel on your screen, please click on the red orange arrow button and what we call the grab tab, you can use that to pop open the rest of the control panel. So that should probably be along the the right side or the left side of your computer screen. Once you have the control panel open, go ahead and check out the audio option. You can either connect via computer, phone, if you select phone or give you a number and access code that you can use to dial in. Or if you really wanted to, you could go no audio, not that I recommend it, you’ll miss out on a lot of the presentation. Once you have your audio settings selected, please let me know that you can hear me by clicking on the black, white and green hand icon. It’s gonna be this icon right here at the bottom of the grab tab. So I’ll give everybody a moment or two to get themselves situated there audio

All right, looks like most folks are able to hear me so that’s good. We’ll keep moving. There is a handout with this presentation, feel free to download that just a simple PDF classic forms one on one. If you have any questions during the presentation, feel free to pop those in the questions box and I’ll answer them as best I can as quickly as I can. This presentation is being recorded. So you will be sent a copy of that recording later today or tomorrow after everything is done process. So I’m gonna give everybody a moment or two just to get settled in and we’ll keep moving

all right.

So just a few things to keep in mind as we move forward with this presentation. Again, today we’re gonna be talking about classic forms, the original DonorPerfect online forms. Talk about a few things that you’ll want to get set up before you get started with your forms. We’re also gonna go through how to create a classic form. And then where to find the data and DonorPerfect. So using the questions box, you can put your answer there, what is one way that you plan on using classic forms? With your DonorPerfect system? Are you looking to just create like a simple donation page and nothing fancy there? Are you looking to set up something for an event? Does your organization have a membership program? You’re hoping to set up? Special membership form? Yeah, no wrong answers. We’re just curious to see what people are interested in. And as I set up the demo, perhaps we’ll we’ll use one of the examples in the demo portion of this webinar. I’m saying we’ve got ticket sales and events coming from a couple of different people. Volunteer registration preparing for A large campaign simple donation page, I’m seeing events is the big one. So that’s probably the the type of format we’ll set up. As we go through the classic forms.

Jessica mentioned events and crowdfunding, I believe we talk a little bit about crowdfunding in this presentation. If we don’t talk about it during this presentation, because we just revamped our online forums, webinars, we don’t talk about it. And this one, I will get you a link to our crowdfunding webinar recording. So you can watch that later today or later this week.

All right. So what are classic forms? Our classic online forms is there an internet based application designed to collect and manage your data. We make it easy to offer secure online forms that do integrate directly with your DonorPerfect system. So you don’t need to build an API, you don’t need to export it to Excel, clean it up and important to DonorPerfect, or they can be set to automatically download into your database. Or if you prefer to have a little bit more manual control, you can download the information when you are ready in batches. So even when you’re doing the downloads, you don’t have to download each item individually, you select a group and you go from there.

They can be used for the course donations. But you can also use them to get people to sign up for mailing lists, to get them to register for events, and purchase or renew memberships, volunteer or log their volunteer hours. And of course, fundraising as mentioned. Now, before you get started with your online forms, you will need to make sure that you have a payment processing gateway. So if you don’t already have a gateway, you’ll want to reach out to our payment processing team. There’s some information that they’ll need to collect and then you’ll be able to start processing. If you don’t have a payment processing gateway, you can still use online forms to collect non donor information. So for example, you can still create those mailing lists signups as volunteer registrations and so on.

Now when it comes to interacting with the online forms, you can create new forms, you can copy existing form, this is the two ways that you can get a new form in your database. Once the form has been created, you have the ability to make changes, you can edit the forms headers, a you can assign specific codes to it, which is a very important tool so that way your donations come in with the appropriate Ledger’s and solicitations and campaigns. And then, depending on the type of online form, classic forms you have if you have plus, you can also add and edit the fields that exist on your forms.

So online forms is accessed by going to apps online forms. If you have access to both the classic forms and drag and drop, you’ll have this little side menu. So again, today we’re talking about the classic forms. If you do not have access to the drag and drop form builder at this time, you’ll just have the online forms option.

From here you have the ability to view your form status, so you can see we’ve got active forms. And if a form is no longer needed, I can deactivate it by clicking on active and selecting the deactivated option. That doesn’t delete it. And it’s still here in the database, but it does prevent people from accessing the form. You can also put a form in test mode which allows somebody to interact with it but it will not process to to view the form you simply click on the title

if you need to delete a form for any reason, you can click on the trashcan icon. We don’t recommend deleting forms if they have any sort of download. Hey History and said you should deactivate them. But if you need to delete a difference a form that has never been used as created by mistake, you can click that trashcan icon.

Click Yes, and the form is removed. To edit an existing form, you click on the pencil button

to copy an existing form, you select the Copy form option. In the upper right corner, you can select the download history or the download settings to see what what has been downloaded before. And you can control your organization’s download settings. With the downloads DonorPerfect will check for matches by default, you can tell the system what fields you want to match on. By default, we select last name, first name and zip code for you. But you can match off a first name, last name address if you prefer a zip code email. Record matching is to use the phrase it’s a more of an art than a science. You’re done donors are going to insert enter data into the forms in a particular way that’s going to be unique to each donor. Your organization might find that your last name, first name and zip code is great. It works really well for you. Or it may not work for you at all. And you should switch to last name and email. Or you might want to use last name, address and ZIP Code. Yep, keep an eye on how your donors are entering information and how your team is entering data. And don’t be afraid to change up the record matching criteria as you go. For your download settings, you can turn on automatic downloads. What that means is when a donation comes in, it will attempt to download into DonorPerfect right away. If it matches to exactly one record, it’ll download to that donors account. If it matches to zero records. It’ll download and create a new donor account. If it matches to more than one potential record, or if there’s a tribute associated with it, it’ll hold the donation in in the online form and wait for a member of your team to come in and manually download the donation. You can also send an email whenever a donation is downloaded. So if there’s a member of your team that likes to stay alert to those things, you can include them in a notification. See, I got a couple of questions. Laurie said we have a team member who uses these for mailing list signups but doesn’t download anything. What are the next steps that I should recommend giving to her? So we’re gonna go through downloading donations, we’re gonna download the data after we do everything else. So I’ll walk you through how to do the download. Depending on what kind of information though you might want to export it to a spreadsheet and import it instead. But I’ll show you that option as well. Crystal is asking, Does the drag and drop have additional formatting options? If so how can I get access, the drag and drop forms are probably the formatting of them is completely different. They have a more modern look and feel they’re much I would say they’re definitely more user friendly to start, there’s less of a learning curve the The downside is right now they are a little limited in some of the functionality they can only be used for standard donation forms. If you are interested in getting access to the new forms, reach out to your account manager. And they will let you know if we are rolling out new those new forms to more clients right now. And if we’re not currently rolling them out, we’ll get you on a waiting list for when we do our next rollout batch.

Now to add a form you click on the Add Form button. We have donation forms. We have signups and surveys, we have event forms, membership forms. And if you have access to the drag and drop form builder, there’s a link that will take you back to it. For donation forms we have what we call the single page form where the donor fills out all of the information on one page. Second page is confirmation third page is just the hey, you know you made your donation. So it’s called single page because the donor only has to interact with one page. For signups and surveys. We have mailing lists, volunteer applications, event forums, we have our classic event. Forum options. As you can see, we’ve had ticket sales sponsors trips and so on. But we also have formats for particular types of events like for example, golf events.

We can also, we also have options to help set up. And we use it for brick and paver sales. But I mean, you can kind of use this to as a launching point for any type of sale item. And of course, we have our membership forms.

To create a new form, you simply select the use this template option, you give the form a name, and choose your donation types. I always recommend credit card and check check just means ACH in this case, no make it as easy as possible for your donors to give. You can set up one time and recurring options, different forms may have different options here. For example, event forms a lot of ticket sales and sponsorships. And then you click on

finish that up. Once you do that, you can continue to the form.

And you can start making changes. So for example, I can edit my header, I can style the form set up my email options set of codes. And we’ll we’ll get into all of that here momentarily. And then I also have the ability to add and edit fields or add extra donation items.

Now once we’re once we get into the demos for editing forms, because there’s an interest in events, I’m going to use this black tie blue jeans form. So that’s what we’re going to be working with moving forward. Now before we start editing, I want to talk about the anatomy of a form. So forms are broken down into pages. They’re basically the same as if you go to the doctor’s office, and especially if it’s like the first time you’re visiting that doctor, they give you that medical form and you got to fill everything out. Same thing just online. So for example, you have the donation page, where the donors are filling out their donation information. Sometimes certain types of forms, split the donation page between the the item page and then the donor Details page. Other forms put all that together just depends on the type of form and building. Then you have the confirmation page. Typically they don’t interact with any of the fields here, they’re just reading over it making sure the information is correct. And then finally, there’s the payment or receipt page. Now each page is going to be made up of multiple sections. So for example, here we have the donor information section. And then we also have a favorite candy section. So maybe this form was used around Valentine’s Day for candy grams. So sections allow you to group similar fields together. Again, much like if you’re filling out a form at the doctor’s office or job application or anything like that your your personal information is usually going to be in one section then there’s always a section where it’s asking you if you have any symptoms or job history depending on the type of form. And as I mentioned, each section is broken down into fields. So the field is any element on a page that your constituents can interact with to provide data. So the donor information section has fields for name, address, phone number, email address. The donation item may have a field where they select a gift amount or you might allow them to choose the ledger that they want the donation to go towards. And speaking of donation items, any section on a field that involves contributions or any sort of financial transaction is known as an item. So if there’s money, it basically changing hands through the form that is the item.

Items can come in different forms such as items income items can come in with different types such as dropdowns. We have a drop down item, we can have a radio button as you can see

on the screen here, we can also just do a simple as typing $1 amount. And then with those items you can oftentimes we’d like give your donors the ability to pick and choose certain coded fields. If you can give them the ability to select the general ledger through a How would you like your money to be directed type field

now, with your sections, you can add new sections to a form. So firstly you have to select the specific page. And then if you are adding a brand new section, you will have to add a new item or you have to add a field to it. And then you can also reorder and rename the sections. And then under fields, you can add new fields. You can also add existing fields. If you are adding a brand new field to the online form, it is highly recommended that you create the field and DonorPerfect first, that way you know that the field is set up with the formatting that you want and DonorPerfect it exists in the section that you want and DonorPerfect. Yeah, you don’t have to worry about it just being added to a random online form section on whatever screen you can delete fields from forms. If you don’t have online forms plus, we recommend hiding them instead of deleting them. If you have forms plus you can absolutely delete and recreate later if you need to. And you can also apply additional formatting options. If it’s a date field you can make sure that there is a specific date format with a little calendar icon. You can also move fields around and you can adjust the number of characters that a field can accept. So let’s go back into the form. And first we’re going to work through the basics and then we’ll work a little bit on some fields of items.

So if we view the form again, we can see the information that we have so far on my header yeah can put in my I can put in all my header information

for example, join us for a fun filled night of our first ever black tie blue jeans blue jeans event on Friday April 21 2023.

Little my monitors just went dark so I can’t see anything. There we go. Okay, we’re back.

So I can have that information. I can save my header to all pages. Or I can just save it to one page. So for example, if I don’t want the extra information on all the other pages and I can remove that and just save one page at a time.

If you want to change the header image, you can do that you can either select the placeholder image or if you copy the form like I did, you can replace the image that was already there, you can select the replace icon. And you can either choose a new image from your library or you can upload a brand new image

under the form styler, you have the ability to make changes to how the form is going to look. So here’s a preview of my form currently. Now the logo, it’s not a live look at your form. So the logo is always going to have this placeholder image here. But we have different themes that you can choose from. We have some background so blue linen makes sense for a Blue Gene event. You can update the font

if there’s a particular font that you prefer

Okay, To update the color

and you can either put in hex color codes, or you can use the little gradients slider

you can change the, the shapes if you realize Ooh, yeah, maybe I should not have used that color, you can always change it back. So I think we’ve got probably a little too much blue going on here. So we’ll switch that back over

if you have somebody on your team or if you hire out, like a contractor that can work with CSS, we do provide you with the ability to access CSS coding for your forms. We do not train more support the CSS, we also don’t store the CSS coding anywhere. So if you are purchasing that service from, you know, like an independent contractor or web designer, just make sure that you copy the CSS coding and save that elsewhere. That way, that way, in case it’s accidentally overwritten by a member of your team, you can get it back. But again, we do not train or support the CSS coding, we just give you access to it if you have the ability to use it.

Under set email options, we provide you with a default email receipt, you can customize the from address, we can customize the subject. Hey, again, you can replace the image

we have that you can put all of your information in here. And you can also set your item codes.

Now if you have an event form, the item code is determined right away when you build the form. And I’ll show you what that looks like in just a moment. One thing I need to do here is make that active. So you can see because when I built this form, I selected the black tie blue jean, to keep almost saying black sheen blue tie, well I created the form I selected that particular code. So that’s the one that appears. So when you are building what we call an event form, if you want it to integrate with event management when you check the EMI code option, it’ll ask you to select the event that you want to use. And then it’ll lock that code in. So that’s that’s what I had done with this form originally. The rest of the codes can be updated freely. You know if this fundraiser is putting money into our building funds, you know, that’s the general ledger I want to choose. Yeah, if I have a particular thank you letter code for the tickets, I can make sure it says ticket purchase for the gift type and I have online forms. For my sponsorship levels I have different sponsorship codes

and when I’m ready to share the format with other people, I have the links and sharing options so that’s the basics for setting up your forms.

Now if you want to be able to add new items, you’ll need to go through a specific process so under fields and items, we have the ability to customize fields we have the ability to customize items. So with the add new item option, we simply go into fields and items. We select the item we select the table that we want to add it to we select the field there so we select the item type that we want to put in there, again, the dropdowns, the radio buttons, and then it just asks us to customize some certain information.

So under fields and I usually get item availability, I have registration options, I have sponsorship options. If there’s an item that you don’t want on your form, you can hide it. Once an item has been created, it cannot be removed from the form. So in this case, we will have to leave the premium and presenting sponsors in there. But we can hide them so they’re not visible. Let’s say I wanted to add another item under this donation option section, what I’ll do is click on Add item I can either copy an existing item from the form or I can use one of my pre made templates. So for example, if one time textbox radio button drop down tributes, we have a monthly gift quarterly gift annual gift, a recurring option where they can choose the frequency and we have an item sale. That say I’m going to do the I’m going to put an item sale here. So then I click Next I choose how many, I want to be able to sell it one go out and pick the name. So what we’ll call this will be the

call this collar sale. And we’ll go with what we’ll do up to four at a time. And choose how much each item is going to be worth we’ll say that we’re selling these black tie Blue Gene animal college for $10. You can choose the field where we want the quantity to be stored. So I have a quantity field right here. And then click Next.

If you want to change the screen name, you can you can update that In the Screen Name column.

If it is an item with limited quantity, you can put that quantity in there. And maybe we have 100 of them. Then when the quantity goes down to zero, you can put in a sold out message. Go back onto your basics, and I go to set item codes. I can choose the codes for this as well.

If the code is not in the form, already, you can create it back and doing it perfect. So for example, let’s just go ahead and assign the rest of the codes here. There’s no solicitation code for college sales. So what I can do is in DonorPerfect under Settings, code maintenance. I can look for my sub solicitation and I can say

collar sale. That’s now in my database. I reload the page in the online form. I can now choose college sale. Any it asks do you have to do anything to add receipt information to the bottom of your email under set email options. By default, this include item details is checked. If you uncheck that, it’ll take off the receipt information. Otherwise, you know your forms are automatically going to include that data. So unless somebody unchecked that Annie, you’re good to go out of the gate

All right now with our fields, we have the ability to add fields, we can edit fields. We have some default fields, first name, last name, address, we’ve got all that good stuff if you want to change the screen name. If for example, if I want to make cell phones a mobile phone, I can do that very easily. If I want to make a field required, I can check the required box

under that I have this attendee Information section that we’ve included. So we can see Add attendance type we’ve got how somebody be attending the event. Now, I’m going to remove these two fields just so I can show you how to add the fields back in. So if I click on the trashcan icon to delete a field

select yes. And it’s removed. Well, I can put that back in by clicking on Add Field.

So I can choose the field type textbox memo box drop down label checkbox radio button, this case is going to be a checkbox.

Click Next. Select the allergy diet option again, click the Next button. And then to put it in a particular spot, I use these arrows

on the right side. So I can move that to the area that I want to see it. And if I preview my page if I move to the second page, I can see my attendee Information section

if I want to make changes to my tickets, for example, I can click this edit pencil, I can update the display prompt here. I click on View edit choices, I can change the value. So for example, if the tickets are actually going to be at $5, I can update the display so that says 85. And then if I view at choices, I can also update the amount.

For my pet collar option, if I click on Add Field, maybe I want to include a field for the type of pet,

I can click on Add Field who wants to be a drop down I can select drop down list.

And if the fields that are already in the system, I can add it here. Again, we really recommend that you create the fields and DonorPerfect first, but I’m going to create it here

I can put in some options. So for example, I might say a cat and go dog and we’ll go with other default that field the blank. Click Next. Save preview the page

now, that being said, where that field ends up, that’s a gift field. So under Settings screen designer, I take a look at the gift screen

and look for that type. But it shows up in the online forum section. So if I don’t want that there, I have to remove that later. So something to keep in mind. We really recommend you put the put the field where you want it to exist first and then add that then add it to the form.

And finally, if you want to reorder the fields that you already have, you can do so by clicking on the blue pencil next to the field. That’ll bring up the Edit Tool Again, this is also where you can apply different formatting. So for example, this has proper formatting but I could also just say like, hey, everything’s lowercase or there’s no formatting. And that’s something we really recommend if you’re setting up a field make sure it has the formatting that you’re looking for. And then click Next. And you can arrange the fields so if I wanted first name to be separate from last name, you know I could add a new line and then rearrange it or if I do want them on the same line, I just have to make sure that they are grouped together between two different lines

for email, maybe I want to move email next to the mobile phone field I can save that hide the home phone field and now I preview the page

now it’s so fun email means I don’t think I saved I didn’t save it earlier when I change to mobile.

So now the form has been customized, it collects the information that I’m interested in. And now it’s time to fill it out crystal which option were you referring to

so to move fields around in the form, you go to fields and items, select fields. And then you can click on the pencil next to the field that you want to move

and then you select the field that you want to move and you can use the up and down arrows

on this screen, all of the fields that exist are going to be available to move around even if they are hidden so for example I did hide optional line I did hide home and business phone, but they are still here so that way if I make them visible later I can make sure that they’re in the right spot. And then to get them on the same vertical row you just make sure they are between two lines of first name and last name are both on line one before line two, address address two are both on line three. So you just all of us want to get them all into the same line for the most part unless you have like a super large monitor. Two fields is all that’s going to fit on the same row. So typically, you just want to group two of them together at a time your monitor might be able to handle three but again most the time when your donors are looking at it it’s just going to put two next to each other on their phone it’s just going to put one one field at a time

Alright, so I want to pull form and we’re gonna have to have a donor make a contribution to someone who’s gonna buy two tickets Hello also purchase a caller for that

They’re going to be attending in person, and that there’s a mushroom allergy.

Now, if you are selecting a, an event form, and they can either purchase multiple tickets, or if there’s a sponsorship that has multiple seats, they can fill out their guest information. So, by default, it will do guest x of what they can put in the rest of the information.

We can also choose the meal choice. Click Next.

Confirm the details put in the credit card.

We have our billing information.

And that information has been finalized, the donation has been accepted by the form. And now it’s going to wait for a download. We’ll make another donation here just so we have a few pieces of information to download. So far, we have some brand new two minutes to see administering a DonorPerfect database question how does the event form got to community What’s the link between the donor on the event to the nonprofit who created the form so you can share the form. When you edit the form, there is a link and sharing section. And you just use it you can use a friendly link for printed materials. Or you can use the full link to put a button on a website or embedded an email. And then there’s the short link to use on your Facebook and other social media sites. So it gets shared out by members of your organization sharing it out. So usually email blasts social media posts, some organizations will include QR code in the newsletter

and then once somebody fills out the form it captures their data and then you can download it into your DonorPerfect system and then they then they become one of your constituents or donors least asked how would you go about creating a bypass feature for those fields that would not be appropriate, ie the food allergy diet section one virtually. Unfortunately, the classic forms do not have any sort of conditional formatting. So if somebody selects virtual they would just need to skip the next section about dietary restrictions there’s there’s not a way to have that visible for some and hidden for others. The only exception to that is if you are using our forms and you have tribute information that tribute fields are conditional they only show up if somebody has attribute of a for any custom fields unfortunately it’s everybody gets the same thing

we’ll have somebody grab a sponsorship your silver.

Click Next for this one. My meal choice probably shouldn’t be required since I can put guest one up and everything like that. So I’m not going to fill out all the information just for the sake of time. We’re just going to grab one of every meal. That way no matter what somebody can get. Hopefully everybody’s happy.

Click Save and again, credit card information.

So we’ve got donations ready to be downloaded to download select the pending number in the form that you want to download from so I can’t download all of them under this all forms option I do have to download by form so I click the number two now in this case there appears to be a system error of some kind there’s probably a field or code that maybe exists on the form that’s not in DonorPerfect so I won’t be able to download those

but fortunately I do have

like it’s giving me an error on all of these let me just fill out

a donation on this form.

does look like Jennifer’s donation downloaded so that’s good. So if we are in DonorPerfect although I wanted to make sure that you could all see that process turn off automatic for a second I’m gonna fill out the form one more time with You.

Because I use the same card number at flag doesn’t duplicate so let me just use my domain card here

there we go as an anti fraud feature if the same credit card is used in rapid succession within I think it’s like five minutes it’ll it’ll flag it as a duplicate it’ll prevent the the doubt the processing

so we’ll select Joyce’s donation we click download to DonorPerfect and then in her record

looks like it may have created a duplicate Joyce wouldn’t surprise me if I spelled her name wrong. It did make a second choice. But if I click on Oh yeah, I spelled spell your last name incorrectly that second time. But we can see

Well for some reason that one didn’t want to download. So that’s this is now the time that I go reach out to my accountant and my product specialists and see what’s going on. But we did successfully download Jennifer’s donation so I’ll take a look at hers

and her donation did successfully download into DonorPerfect so apologize that I was ran into a couple of issues back to back to back. But we were able to get a donation to download and we can see that type of gift. The general ledger solicitation the Thank you, everything is ready to go.

So in review, classic forms are the tool used to collect supporter data and online donations. You do need a safe safe payment gateway in order to process donations. If you don’t have a gateway, you can still have a mailing form you can sell volunteer forms but you cannot accept donations. And online forms can be customized to align with your organization’s brand and message. So this time if anybody has any questions, I’m happy to stick around for a couple of minutes and answer them. Otherwise enjoy the rest of your day and have a lovely weekend.

I don’t see any questions popping in. So again, have a lovely rest of your day. Might see you in a little more than an hour for our power of Thank you presentation. And otherwise have a lovely weekend. Take care bye