Classic Forms in DonorPerfect

Hello everyone. My name is Arlene Lessee, and welcome to this session on Classic Forms 101.

Before we dive right in, let’s first go over the agenda. So first off, we’re going to define Classic Forms. We’ll talk about a couple of the requirements that need to be made Read More

Hello everyone. My name is Arlene Lessee, and welcome to this session on Classic Forms 101.

Before we dive right in, let’s first go over the agenda. So first off, we’re going to define Classic Forms. We’ll talk about a couple of the requirements that need to be made before you start creating a form. Then we’re going to dive in and create a donation form in a snap. You’ll see how easy it is to do that. We’ll put in a test donation and then download it to DonorPerfect to show you how the data comes over to DonorPerfect. So what is or what are classic forms? Well, they are the online forms that integrate with DonorPerfect. Now the classic forms can be used for a multitude of applications. Probably the most common is going to be for fundraising. So these will be the forms where you will collect donations or have your donors opt into a monthly giving or recurring pledge. You can also build event registration forms with classic forms, whether you are selling tickets or sponsorships or collecting registrations for a free event, all of that is possible in the registration category or events. You can also have a form on your website where people can fill that out and be added to your mailing list. If your organization sells memberships, you can have a form where someone can purchase a membership. Online volunteer forms allow you to actually collect information about someone interested in volunteering, or you can have a form where volunteers can submit the time that they worked and have that information downloaded into DonorPerfect and many more. So let’s explore a little bit more before you start designing a form, first of all, you need to make sure that you have access from the Apps menu, and you should see online forms listed there. You also will need a safe save payments gateway now this gateway is what needs to be approved in order to accept online donations. If you’re starting out with a mailing list or possibly a survey form or something where there is no money being taken on that form, then you can create that form. But in order to have a form where there will be money transacted or submitted, you will need to make sure that your safe, safe payments gateway is in existence or has been recently approved when you have a safe, safe payments gateway, that also means that a merchant processor has been established. If you’re a United States client, then that merchant processor is DP payment services powered by Safe, safe if you’re in Canada, the merchant processor will be vantive. Now the merchant processor is really the inner workings of the financial networks to transmit funds back and forth. The merchant processor allows your organization’s bank account to be credited with the donation, and for the donors credit card or checking account to be debited or charged when they initiate that transaction, and there will be a little bit of time afterwards for that to settle and go through all of the banking institutions requirements. So what can you do with an A classic form? You can definitely create a new form from scratch. Now the good news is it’s not completely designing it from scratch. We give you several templates, and I’ll be showing. You shortly what those different categories of templates are, but you’ll start with one of those examples and then embellish or add on to that. If you like a form and want to use it and maybe change a couple things, you can copy an existing form. Or, let’s say you’ve started a form and you didn’t have time to finish, or you needed to get some things from my colleague. You can, by all means, edit a form along any stage of the process. What we’re going to be going over today are the items found or the menu items found under the basics, and there are some more advanced options under the menu of fields and items. So with that being said, let’s jump into DonorPerfect. So under the apps here. From there, you’ll want to make sure that you notice a processing gateway. We’re not going to go there right now, but that needs to be in place. If you’re intending to have a form that collects money, I’m going to click on Online Forms and that will take me here. The logo up at the top is DonorPerfect, or DP online forms, and this area is known as the review and acceptance center. We call it rack for short, our AC. Now let me briefly go over what is here on the rack. So the first column on the left is the status of that particular form, if it’s got a green light and it says the status is active. That means that that form could, and hopefully does, exist on your website, a test form, however, could be finished, but it will not be able to accept real credit cards or real checking account info. So make sure that if you do any testing that you do ultimately make that form active by clicking on activate when you’re ready. Last but not least, if you are retiring a form from your website, you can toggle here to show deactivated. And if we see any things here, these forms are the ones that either were not finished or are no longer applicable. So we don’t want a donor being able to find that form on our website. We have the ID number of the form internally assigned by DonorPerfect, the lower the number the generally speaking, the older the form is, the higher the number, the more recently that form was created. Here are your internal form names. This may have something to do with the button or the menu under which they appear on your website, but not necessarily so it doesn’t have to be the same thing the for instance, summer soiree 2024 could be under a button that is on the events menu for register, but this is the actual form where the tickets and or sponsorships could appear so our form name, if we click on something, then that will actually take us to the form. Here are three icons, the trash can representing the ability to delete a form. The pencil allows you to edit a form, and the last being copy, if you like, what you have and you want to use that and change something, you may copy an existing form. And then we have three columns here, pending may represent any submissions that have yet to be downloaded into DonorPerfect. They could be volunteer profile. They could be requests to be added to the mailing list. They could be donations with tributes. If there’s anything in the pending column, you’ll click on the number, you’ll review those items, and if it’s a successful donation or registration or request to be added to a mailing list, you’ll then select it and tell it tell DonorPerfect to download those items. Donor Perfect.

Once they’re downloaded, the pending will go to zero and that will be added. If there were anything already there would be added to your downloaded. Notice that pending plus downloaded will equal total over here we see the total amount collected on the form, so a nice little report for you available. All right, what we’re going to do is going to add a form. So many of you will not see this grid here or table, and when you come into the online forms, you’ll be presented with this orange or yellow button to add a form when you click on that. If it is the very first form that you are editing, then it will be it’ll ask for an email to which it will send an email to that address and give more of a congratulations for creating your form. And here are some relevant links in the knowledge base. So I’m going to click Add form. When we do this, we’ll want to look at all of the options available here, this category is going to be the one used most often being for donations. We have different scenarios. And if you’re not sure what a form does, simply click on the Preview. Notice this form has both a one time and the recurring option. This form will be used, hopefully for giving Tuesday. This form here on the left is probably the most popular option, and we’ll be demonstrating this template momentarily. The other categories that we have are sign ups and surveys. So sign up to be on a mailing list, sign up to be a volunteer, or specifically event volunteer, and we have after the shift has been worked, that volunteer can come to an online form and submit their hours, and then we have two rating forms that are available. Speaking of events, this ticket here represents why you might have ticket purchases. For instance, you’ll need a form to sell tickets if you are going to use events management, which is found from the Tasks menu. Events Management, if you have this option and plan to use events management, then you’ll want to use or you’ll need to use this form with the magician and the rabbit, and you’ll click, use this template. If you’re not planning on using events management, or that is not included in your package, then you can use any of these other forms this specifically for golf, has the verbiage and terms in terms of Foursome, this banquet might ask for with whom you Want to be seated at a table and a bowling specific form, but this form is generic and can be used for golf or a gala or any other sporting event where tickets and or sponsorships are sold, and our last quarter category here is for selling memberships or renewing memberships, and these are available if you sell memberships to individuals, families, etc. So we’re going to go with this donations category, and we’re going to use this template.

The single donation and we click here to use this template, we’re going to give it an internal name, like here in the payment options, credit card is selected if you have applied for the ACH, also known as E check capability in the safe, safe payments account, then you might want to check that right off of the right at the beginning. Inning. This would be the currency that can be accepted us, dollar, Canadian dollar or pound sterling. This single donation form can have both the option of recurring as well as one time. Should you choose to have only one. For instance, this would be a form dedicated to monthly giving. If we de select recurring, then the form can only take one time donations. We’d suggest that you have both enabled unless you specifically want to have a recurring form for a particular club. And here is an email address, and that person will receive an email confirmation that the form has been created, click, finish setup. And that allows us to get a URL, I can view that URL or that website, and I see a form, and it is functional, but not we are not finished with it. What we’ll need to do is most likely drop in a picture, maybe a kind of tagline to tell people, either a catchphrase or our mission, and maybe we want to put some color here, and lots of other things, but that’s our URL to start. So these are some suggestions of things that you might want to do to make this form more attractive and make sure that donors want to continue and fill out the form. So let’s continue to our form. All right, we are going to work with the basic section today. I recommend that you start at the top and work on each of these menu items. You can go out of order, but it’s a good idea to start at the top and work your way down. Now you’ll probably want a logo on this form, so I’m going to delete this placeholder, so to speak. I’m going to type a again tagline or mission or statement that is the call to action. Please donate today to help the animals of a particular county or your state or whatever the case may be. Now I might want to center that. So I’ll choose this alignment tool. I might want to make that font bigger, and I might want to make some color choice here. All right, if I want to use a picture, I can click on this insert image, and I’m going to go on my other screen and find my image and just drop it here. All right, so it’s telling me it doesn’t like that file name. Why? Because it because it has spaces in it.

So I’m going to need to rename it, and now I should be able to drop it over beautiful and we might want to resize it to be a little more noticeable. Now, while you can have different images and different I’ll call them call to action or tagline here for each of the three pages, it might be a lot faster to just save to all pages and then come back and swap out the image and or text. Notice that there is a donation form where the user is going to initially be taken, then the user will confirm their choices, and then finally, the last page is a receipt page on the screen. So your donation is actually a three part form. Your page footer would be at the bottom of each of those three pages. You’ll notice some legal ease here, which has been given to you. We recommend that in your system setting. Things that you show the footer editor, and if it’s not already there, you would want to put the name of your organization, physical mailing address and an email as well as a general phone number that they can reach out to whether it’s related to this form or any inquiries at all, any changes, make sure that you click save here, and we’re going to go back to the form footer setup so that is what’s meant for the footer here. Let’s go to our next item in the menu to style our form. This is where we’ve created a form Styler to make it user friendly while there is the capability to make changes in the cascading style sheet, that’s what the cascading style sheet code stands for. If you make changes using this then, just letting you know that our support team is not able to help you. But if you want to go with the launch form styler, the easy way is going to be, for instance, I like rounded boxes myself, and we can just make this really quick and choose a preset theme if that were to work with your organization’s color scheme. But if not, then what you want to do is use the option number two and customize various areas. So doing this, we can decide if we want texture or not, if we want gradient or not, the background color. This is where you’re going to either use your slider, and I might want to get a version of blue here that matches if you’ve been given the hex code, simply paste it in here, or type the hex code at the bottom and click, OK, all right, we’re in the blue zone, so to speak. So that looks great. My font color, I’m going to leave it on gray right now, but in doing this color, I’ve lost the ability to read what the names of the section headers are. So you want to make sure that this is easily legible to anyone who comes to your website. So section header, maybe the background color here to make the white stand out. I might want to make it a very pale blue. I so that there’s a little bit of contrast. All right, beautiful. So I’ve got something in the neighborhood. I like how this looks. You can change the background color of the sections here. I’m not going to do that today, the corners, yes, as well as changing the primary color of the buttons. And then when it’s hovered on, you can change the complementary color. So if my organization has two colors, I can incorporate that.

I’m going to try and go with a gray so that my Hover colors, yes, 250 and that looks really nice. All right, don’t forget, as you progress through these menus, always click save, or, in this case, save and close. Beautiful. Now, if I’d like to kind of test my form out, because maybe I just saw a little preview of what those colors looked like, I can come up here to the top right and view my form in a new tab. Okay, not bad, not bad. But if I want to come back and kind of tone it down perfectly fine to change the intensity of this color, but I do see it’s clearly labeled, I can definitely discern what each section is for. All right, we’re making progress. Next menu item, set email options.

What you’re going to do is the from name here is something generic. It could be development team. It could even be the name of your. Executive Director, Development Director, the reply to should be an email that belongs to your organization.

It can be either a person specifically or a generic one that’s received by one or more individuals. This is in case the donor receives the email confirming the donation, but hits the reply on that email and asks you for some unrelated information or has a question about their donation. So you want to make sure that that reply to is meant for your organization. Now, one other important thing you want to do here is expand the show more options and for payment forms, make sure that it says when the payment is submitted, but please check the BCC email. This is going to help you out, so that if you wanted to kind of monitor the volume and the dollars and who was actually making the donations in the BCC, you’re going to type in an email address.

If this were a legitimate email, let’s just say it is for now, if another person may be in finance needs to get this email as well, and you can have a third name. Now, these are going to be BC seed, but this will give you an idea of the frequency and who of the Donate are making the donations. You can update the image here, just like we did earlier, by clicking on the image icon. If you want to use the same image that’s on your form, you’re perfectly welcome to do that. If you’d like to change the body, you may do that.

And if you want to put in while it has organization name, if we’re going to put in the name of your executive director and then organization name, we’ll pull from the name of Your organization that would be found at the top, right above this box. So if we save any changes here, make sure you click on that button. All right, beautiful. The set item codes, please make sure that you review this before the very first donation. The reason is that you want to address at a very minimum, what General Ledger code will the gift have, what solicitation code will the gift have, whether a another Thank you. Was needed, and maybe some other options, like campaign, etc. But I’m going to go to gift pledge amount, let’s say that I want to review the choices. So we’re suggesting 500 Okay, I think I’m going to suggest 100 I’m 100. So I can add that, and you want to make sure that you’re going to provide five choices. Why? Because there’s going to always be a button labeled other where the donor can write in their desired contribution. Now we want these to appear in a logical order, so I’m going to take my 100 row and move it up. I’m going to take my $75 row and move that up. And if there is any amount that you would like to suggest, maybe we want to suggest 75 so that will be already highlighted. Otherwise, you can have it defaulted to none, and they all look the same color. But I’m going to highlight 75 and kind of encourage that. I’m going to click save here. I’ll save again when I’m done here. What you want to do is on the row for solicit code, that is your solicitation field on the gift screen, as well as on the pledge screen. If they’re making a recurring gift, if I want this to be annual appeal, 24 beautiful. If there’s something else that I would like, but it’s not in the list, what you’ll want to do is save what you have so far and in DonorPerfect, come back, go to Code maintenance, go to the desired field like solicitation, click go, and maybe you want to add a new option in the code and description, click Save. Then when you come back here, refresh the page and whatever you added in donor, perfect code maintenance would be available in this drop down. All right, General Ledger, unrestricted. What if you would like to give donors the option of choosing where they month want their money to go? Well, we can do that very easily. We simply unhide or display this. Field, which is GL Code, and we’re going to change the words, please apply or assign my donation to support, please. Okay, instead of the word support here, all right, let’s just leave. Please apply my donation to I’ve got all these options, but if something should not be on the form as a choice, we simply delete the row. This will not delete the code in Donor Perfect. It simply removes it from one of the choices in the drop down. So I’m going to go through here. I’m going to remove anything that is not applicable, but then we get a very popular unrestricted now, in most cases, unrestricted is more commonly known to the donor as where needed most. So if that’s what you would like to do, or if you have annual fund and you want that to say where it needed most. Great. Just make sure you only have one appearance of it. I’m going to scroll down and excellent. Please apply my donation to annual fund. I’m going to actually move the where needed most up to the top, and that’s where we see that that is defaulted. I click Next and simply save from here. Make sure I’m going to hit save here, just in case I click out of this accidentally. All right, so solicitation, let’s go with annual appeal for now, thank you. Letter number, if you are going to send the donors an additional acknowledgement, you may want to use standard Thank you. If there is no additional Thank you needed, then I would recommend that in code maintenance, under the field thank you or receipt template that you add a choice for no thank you needed using the code and description save that, refresh the form, and then you would find no thank you needed in the drop down. But let’s go with standard for now, the gift type. We want to say that it came in from the online form, or whatever option has, W, l, a, which stands for web link, admin, if you’re using the campaign field, we’re still in calendar year 24 so I might want to label these donations as annual campaign 24 click save, and that’s it. That was easy. All right, last but not least, we’re going to finish this up with the links and sharing. Now the great news is we do have this long link that we can copy. Page and put in an email and send to our communications or our website, person or whatever resource you have for getting this form on your website, meaning, if your website has a menu that says donate or it says support or give today, then whatever button or menu is the one that you want to direct to this form, then this is the URL that your web designer needs to embed or attach to the Donate today, or whatever button is going to be on your website, and you may have that URL mentioned more than one place in more than one place on your website. If we want to create a friendly link, we can do so here I’m going to recommend that you put in either your organization’s name, or if it’s a lengthy Name, maybe you want to use an acronym.

All right. Carl acres, donate. I’m going to click Create ah that has already been used. So I have to change up something okay, that already exists. Jen, general donation. Let’s try that third time. Is a charm, beautiful. Now I get the friendly link, and at the same time it’s created a bitly link that you can use on your organization’s Facebook page or and, or Twitter, all right, last but not least, if you want an image that you’re going to put on a mailed appeal, then You can click, generate a QR code and copy that long URL, for instance, and download the PNG. And here is that phenomenal QR code that you can use, all right. So with that, we are finished with the basics. So in order to test this form, I’m going to call call or click on the logo. I could use a real credit card if you’re going to do so, you must use $5 as the minimum transaction. I’m going to, actually, though, change it into a test mode. I can be a little bit more extravagant. In a test mode, I’m going to click Yes. I’m going to either click on the URL and paste it here, or simply click on this URL, click on the name of the form. All right. Notice it’s quite visible here that this form is currently in test mode. So if I’m going to do a transaction for $250 the good news is it will not be charged to this fake credit card that I’m going to provide. The bad news is it will not be deposited in your organization’s bank account, but it is good for testing purposes. So just want you to be aware of that. Notice the 75 is pre selected. Now you know what? I’m going to up it to 250 it’s a one time donation. Please apply my donation to which particular fund, maybe I’d like to say Annual Fund, if that’s going to be different from where needed most. This is your tribute area that when you check that opens up these fields. I’m going to leave that off of this donation, and then I’m going to put in a hypothetical donor by the name of Ethan Moore. Address is 1212, Red Wing road. The city. These are fictitious, 19001, and notice anything with a star? Here is a required field. Now. If you want to test this and see what the thank you letter email or the thank you email that’s automatically generated is, then I’d recommend putting in maybe your personal email, but I’m just going to not the right spelling. I’m just putting in something that is recognized as an email because it has the at symbol, and this is the calculation of the covers cost. So that is defaulted to Yes, I’m going to choose credit card unless I had a fictitious bank account to do, but I do not, so I’m going to leave it right now on credit card, and I’m going to be putting in a four and 15 ones, and you can use the same fictitious credit card.

Then a combination in the future of month and year, any three digits will work here. We’re going to check Same as above. Thomas, more, again, there’s a typo here, but I’m not concerned about that. Checking out everything, making sure that you set your footer, that there’s no typos hit the next it will then ask me to review and see if anything needs to be changed. If so, we’ll hit the back arrow, because these are read only. This shows me the cover cost that I’m opting in. If I needed to fix something, I’d hit the back button.

Otherwise we’re good. Let’s submit the payment, the fake payment again, and we should get a pop up that says that our donation was successful. Yay. Your payment was approved. So it’s acting as if this were a real payment, and then this is what you could print if this were your donation. So be careful, because this is a test donation. I’m going to close this tab, and because I’m doing this, in the span of one minute, I’m going to refresh this page. And this is great. This shows me that it’s already downloaded. Now that setting was determined by this drop down at the top right the download settings. If you wanted to go into donor, perfect automatically, right? If you want to leave it in pending, so you can review and determine if a new donor should be created, or if you’re going to update an existing donor, etc, then you would uncheck automatic and hit Save. And this is the matching algorithm, as we call it, all right, so I’m in Donor Perfect, and I’m going to look up the correct spelling. Look. Look for Mr. Thomas More, all right, we will sign back in.

You should not need to sign back in. But Thomas More, all right, that did not happen. 

Uh, that’s why spelling counts, not Thomas, but Ethan. If I just typed in more, it would have found him. So here we see Ethan at 1212, Red Wing road. Everything looks great. Yes, that’s a fake email. We do see these statistics which confirm that it looks good. I’m going to know I noticed on the main screen his name and address. So the email here is Thomas, but his first name is Ethan, hence the confusion the gifts tab shows me, in this case, the donor covers cost came in with the gift as one donation. That is a setting that you can change if you want them separated. But I like what I see. Annual Fund came in and. To appeal 24 I’m happy with that, yay. But what you’re going to do is, again, this is fictitious. So from the main screen, I’m going to go to More Actions and delete Ethan Thomas, whatever his name is, and the fake, fake donation. So I’m going to say delete donor here. And if doing that, I’m also going to come back here in a second, but show you if I’m if I want to delete the fact that $250 came in, click on the downloaded number, check the row for Ethan Moore and his donation, and we’re going to delete this because we don’t want it inflating the total dollars that were collected on this form. So yes, I’m going to delete it. I’m happy with how the form performs. Therefore, make sure your final step is to take this test status, clicking on the word test and choose activate. It must have a green button here to accept real credit cards and or real checking accounts. So now I’m good. I’m going to send that URL over to my web master and let them know that either a previous page or if you did not have an online donation page, then this is the new place, or this replaces a previous page, and we are good.

So let us now just recap DonorPerfect, classic forms are a tool to accept online donations and more. We saw other categories. If, however, you are taking donations or payments on the form, you must have a safe save payment gateway that has been approved and we saw how easy it is to apply the branding and color scheme to your form that is already in existence on your website.

So just by a quick placement of an image file as well as the colors, and I want to thank you for being a part of this webinar and happy fundraising. Everybody. Take care.