How to Revamp Your Online Donation Form to Increase Its Value

Welcome to The DonorPerfect community conference. I hope you guys are as excited to be here as I am. My name is Jonathan and I will be your host for this session, you are on track number one, and attending the session on how to revamp your online donation forms and increase the form of value. Read More

Welcome to The DonorPerfect community conference. I hope you guys are as excited to be here as I am. My name is Jonathan and I will be your host for this session, you are on track number one, and attending the session on how to revamp your online donation forms and increase the form of value. Before I introduce your speaker, I want to remind you to stick around at the conclusion of the session for a q&a. You can submit any questions you have during the session. And don’t forget to take the poll in the sidebar. To submit your interest in learning more about this topic. That poll will be posted shortly. Our speaker today we have Shawn Mac McClellan. Mac has worked with DonorPerfect for nearly six years, splitting his time between support and training. His favorite topics are data entry, best practices and reporting. But he really loves watching his clients bring everything together and turning their knowledge into fundraising and mission success. In his spare time, Mack enjoys writing, gaming, hiking, and kayaking. He has three cats named Obi Jack’s and Nico. Right Shan go ahead and take it away. All right,
thank you so much, Jonathan. So as my colleague said, we’re going to be getting into taking your online forms, we’re going to revamp them, and we’re going to help increase their value. So again, I’m going to be going to be your, your speaker for today. And I My name is Sean Mac McClellan, there’s a couple of John’s so we’d like to have fun nicknames to differentiate ourselves. If you’d like to connect with me after the presentation, feel free. My slide has all of this information in it as well. So hit me up on LinkedIn or shoot me an email and we can get talking. So today’s agenda, we are going to get into setting up a donation page. We’re going to talk about different ways to elevate your form. We’re gonna talk about a couple of different ways to share your forms. If you were in my fall presentation last year about giving Tuesday, I’m going to be revisiting a favorite topic of mine. And we’re also going to discuss reporting on your success. So first, let’s talk about setting up those donation forms. So as a little bit of a review, a DonorPerfect form is an online option that collects donors gifts and contact information and allows for immediate receipt generation via email. They make it easy to offer secure PCI compliant donation pages that can be placed on your website, including an email campaigns or shared on social media. Best of all, they integrate directly into your DonorPerfect system allowing you to avoid time consuming and potentially messy imports. I don’t know about anybody else. But I really, I really dislike working on an import file, putting all that data in there and then realizing that all of that time was wasted. And I’ve got to do it again. They’re also mobile, responsive and easy to embed on your websites organization organizations website, you just need that URL code. They’re also simple to build, easy to use and incredibly effective. So if we go into DonorPerfect, and we go under online forms today, we’re going to be focusing on the drag and drop form builder. So if you have access to that you’ll see under apps, your online forms will have a little side toggle, you select your drag and drop form builder
and you’re able to see your list. To edit a form, all you have to do is click on the name. And that takes you right into the editor. If you want to make changes, all you have to do is use our new and simple drag and drop interface. So for example, if I wanted to put in a little bit of descriptive text, add you got to drag that in there. Type in what I want, if I want to remove something, I have to simply delete it. If you’re looking to edit a certain item, and have gone are the days of navigating the side menu, you just click on the item that you want to modify and you’re good to go. So for example, with my gift amounts, I can just click on the gift, enter in the different amounts that I want. Put in new default options. I can update my impact stories which we will be talking about in a little bit here. These are a super important tool, especially if you’re trying to pull in younger donors, they really respond well to impact stories. We can also change the different amounts of between one time and monthly so no longer do you have to choose just one type of donation to focus your amounts on. We can toggle so I have 150 25 and tend for my monthly, smaller amounts since we’ll be giving multiple times a year. But from my one time, I can go a little bigger 500 to 50 150. Do you want to change up your form styler, you know, you can update your background, you can change your buttons. And one of the nicest things about this is we have a color dropper right in there. So you don’t have to memorize a bunch of RGB codes or hex codes or just guessed that you can just pick a part of your screen that you want to mimic and it’ll grab that color for you. Coding fields is never recoding your forms has never has never been easier. The hidden fields button is right there very prominent, you don’t have to go digging for it. And you can either choose one of the four automatically included fields, we’ve got your campaign, your general ledger, your solicitation and your sub solicitation. You can also add additional hidden fields from the gifts screen. So if I wanted to assign this to a particular QuickBooks class, if I’m integrating with QuickBooks, I just have to select it and assign the code. If you want to take that off of your hidden forms, hidden fields, you just click the Delete button. And finally customizing the confirmation page. All you have to do is type in what you want. And what you see is what you get or WYSIWYG editor, you can insert images, add new messages, and all you have to do is update. And no longer do you have to send an email manually after somebody fills out the form. They go, they fill out the form, they make the donation it downloads into your database, and emails either sent directly from the form. Or if you prefer to have it use the email templates in your database, you can select DonorPerfect template. And we can choose here for example, our standard Thank you. Or we can choose given the theme of our form here, I can choose my Summer of Love vacuo. And now whenever somebody makes a donation,
it will if I go into my email templates, it’s going to use my Endless Summer of Love Thank you.
Also, as you make your changes, everything saves automatically. And then when you’re ready for that to go live, you click the Publish button. And then from here, you can copy the link, you can view your form. And we’ll be talking about this new addition to our online forms toolkit, the QR code later in this presentation, but you can also generate those QR codes. And again, if you’re looking to embed, you just click the Copy Link option.
So one of the most important parts in setting up your form is making sure that you have the best donation amounts to match your audience. Every organization is different. Every donor and every organization is going to be different. You might have some donors who give a one on one time large donation each year, you know, holiday season rolls around and you get $1,000 Check once a year like clockwork, but you might also have donors that can’t really afford to drop, you know that much money in one go. And so they might give you, you know, $50 a month, that’s going to be a smaller gift amount, but it’ll add up over time. So when it comes to setting up donation amounts on your form, you want to make sure that you’re offering a range of donation options that your donors are comfortable giving us. For example, if most of your donors are giving between $25 and $50, we want to make sure that we have a $25 donation button and a $50 donation button. You know, that’s where most of our donors are giving and we have a $500 button on there, we’re probably leaving money on the table, because they see that they see that $500 button they go that’s a little rich for my blood, and maybe they maybe they do a write in for a smaller amount of for lucky or possibly they might just close that form and move on to something else. Maybe they’ll send you a check later. So to help you determine what values are going to make the most sense for your database, we recommend checking out the gift range report. So this report, it’s a financial report and everybody’s system. It allows you to look at your data and see what levels your donors are giving up. So for your monthly giving, we can run it based off of the average gift amount. And for the one time gift, maybe we want to swing for the fences and we’ll base our values off have the maximum amount. So in DonorPerfect, we go into reports, we’ll check out the Report Center. And like I said, this is going to be one of your financial reports. So my gift range reports floating up to the top, because I run this pretty regularly. But if you can’t find it, you can always search. And if it’s not already one of your favorites, go ahead and click on the grey star, make it gold, and it’ll pop up in your Favorites folder as well. Now, this report utilizes calculated fields in your database. So by default, it’ll start at maximum amount. So that’s their largest one time donation. But you might also look for an average amount or if you’re fundraising for a particular fund, or if it’s part of a particular campaign, you might build a calculated field, just for that to make sure that your values are accurate to you know, even that even that smaller, more specific audience, you can enter gift split ranges. So my ranges, for example, will be one to $10.10 to 2525 to 50, we don’t have to create the bookends on it, we just say where we want each new segment to start and the report will do the rest. If you want to save those split levels, you absolutely can. And if you want to, we can also, you know, apply a selection filter. So for example, I might just want to pull individuals, because my organization, they’re probably not going to be donating on an online form, they’re more likely to send a check. So I can go main bio donor type is equal to individual.
Click this green button to run the report. And I can see I’ve got 26 donors that live 25 to 49 range, I’ve got 5073 donors to my 50 to 99 range. I’ve got 86 donors my 200 to 500 range, I’ve gotten 90 donors between 500 and 1000. I’ve even got 72 donors that 1000 to 9000. So I can take this information, go back into my form. And for my one time gift amounts, I can potentially either up all of these values, or I could add a $1,000 amount because again, the data supports it, we’ve got a decent number of donors at the 1000 level, they might be more than willing to put a $1,000 donation in through our form. So if we wanted to add that option, I simply would click Add an amount type in the new value.
And I have my $1,000 option accidentally move some of my fields. But the nice thing is all I have to do is drag and drop and take care of that. And then under amount settings. I can also toggle if I want to do one time monthly if I want to default to one time or monthly. And we can also include the description of our gift impact.
And if I want to remove them out, again, just use the trash can cleans it up very easily.
So again, that’s the gift range report, I definitely recommend checking that out. It’s going to be a financial report. And you can run that for more than just maximum out at really any field in your database on any system calculated field in your database is going to be fair game. So for example, here’s a potential range of monthly giving amounts.
So now we’re gonna get into elevating our form. You know, we have we have the basics of the form, we have some donation amounts, everything to make it work, we want to take it to the next level. So first, let’s talk about those impact statements. An impact statement is an important part of your nonprofit story and mission that lets your donors and prospective donors know what how and why your organization does what it does. For many donors, especially millennial and Gen Z donors, impact statements can become the deciding factor on whether or not they will support a particular nonprofit. In a lot of cases, your younger donors don’t have the same amount of money to donate. So they tend to be much more yeah specific, much more deliberate in which organizations that they are supporting. So if they don’t know anything about you, they’re likely to move on and find an organization that is willing to share that information upfront. So DonorPerfect forms provide the opportunity to share an impact story not just for each form, but also for each donation amount. So the more donation amount you offer, the more chances you have of sharing exactly how their funds their money is going to improve your organization. Now, to get the most out of your impact statements, you want to follow these three rules. First, keep the statement short, simple, and to the point. donors don’t want to read an essay before they make their donation. Or I should say Most donors probably don’t want to read an essay before they make the donation. For example, the impact of a $10 monthly gift might be as simple as helps feed to shelter animals each month. To help kind of enforce this rule DonorPerfect forms have a 50 character limit for your impact statements. So make sure that each word each letter each character counts. Also be specific. You’re not here to talk about everything you have going on focus on one or two programs or projects that tie into the greater themes of your form. For example, this form is all about raising money to help with our Endless Summer of Love events, fictional events, where we’re trying to make it easier for people to adopt shelter animals. So we are talking about how donations can help make it easier to adopt the animals in our shelters. And also, this one’s really important. You know, I catch myself doing this when I’m working with clients that are part of nonprofits. But we want to make sure we avoid jargon and specialized language. Remember, your donors aren’t part of each meeting conversation, email teams message, Slack message text that you and your your team are part of. avoid words like solicitation, or general ledger. And we want to use plain language writing to ensure that donors understand what their gifts are supporting. So again, we check out the form. Like I said, with the donation amounts, we can say not only for each type of donation, you know, one time versus monthly. But I can also say exactly what each donation amount is going to cover. So $500 covers the adoption fee for five animals $250 Or three, five, move over to monthly giving amounts. Now $100. Now this is monthly, so I have to change the text a little bit $100 a month, that helps us cover the adoption fees for 20 animals per year. And again, we’re keeping it short, sweet. We’re focusing on a particular part of the mission. There’s adoption fees, and we’re avoiding jargon. Every word here, the average person is going to be able to see it and understand it.
Now let’s talk about I would say arguably everybody’s favorite processor and that is PayPal. So in chat, let me know if you’ve used PayPal or Venmo in the last year whether it’s to donate to buy something online to pay back a friend for lunch or dinner. And but if you’ve used PayPal just pop that in the chat for me
I don’t see any answers flowing in just yet. But just so you know 430 Thought there they are. There’s everybody. Origins 35 million people use Pay Pal in 2022. So that is a lot of people that are using this tool. Again, not just to donate but everyday shopping, giving their roommates money for bills paying for dinner, you know if you don’t want to split the check at the restaurant that digital wallets like PayPal and Venmo are becoming more and more popular each year. And in fact, according to a study biological research, 31% of us respondents said they would not have made their donation without PayPal being offered as an option. So that is almost a third of all people in the US saying that if they can’t use PayPal, they don’t want to donate
And studies have shown that including PayPal as a payment option on your forms can increase unplanned gifts by 32%. And repeat donations by as much as 79%. Also, donors who use Pay Pal are 15% more likely to have a positive donation experience. And 38% of woody donors have abandoned that donation because Pay Pal is not available on the organization’s website. Also, individuals who use PayPal, there are almost four times more likely to donate when PayPal becomes an option. So in the new forms when you go under select your payment method, you have the option now to link a PayPal account a business account to your forms, and then when donors make a one time donation, so monthly donations will still process through save save payment processing gateway. But if your donors make a one time donation, they will see the additional option of PayPal, which will allow them to use PayPal for anything out of their PayPal accounts. Anything through Venmo I believe PayPal also allows them to donate using crypto, there’s lots of options become available to pay later options. Now, if somebody does use pay later, your organization will receive the full donation upfront, the donor will pay it off over time. Definitely something to keep in mind in your forms. All you need is a PayPal business account, you just link it and you can start processing, PayPal and Venmo donations through your online form.
Next, let’s talk about sharing the form. You know we have our forum, we have our donation amounts, we’ve put in our impact statements, we have our PayPal account connected. How do we get it out there, you know, people don’t know where to get to that form. It doesn’t matter what work we’ve done so far, it just gonna sit there. So once you have your form set up, you can share it out through a variety of ways. You can put your forms on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, you can use Tiktok, if you’re savvy enough to figure out that that platform, that’s the one that really still eludes me to this day. While our online forums have a shortened link option, you may also want to consider using a you know, a bitly account or something similar to create shorter custom links, that allows you to do create those links that are easier to put on websites where you have a character limit. Or if you wanted to put a shortened link on a poster or in a journal ad, so that way people can access your website more easily. And then with our drag and drop forms, you can, as I said, easily embed those forms directly into your organization’s website. If you use our constant contact email partner, you can include email lists, in those email blasts that you send out, you generate a campaign, you create a list and DonorPerfect using your filters, send that list over to Constant Contact, include the donation link in your email and send that out. And you can also create QR codes for online donations. So if your organization still uses a lot of physical media, you know, again, posters, journal ads, you’re sending out lots of letters, but you want to try to transition people into giving online you know, you receive the money faster, it shows up in your DonorPerfect system with all the codes that can reduce maybe one day even eliminate a lot of manual data entry. You can start that by utilizing those QR codes. So if you attended our presentation on Giving Tuesday and end of year fundraising last fall, you might remember me gushing about QR codes in conjunction with DonorPerfect forms. If you were I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to listen to me do it again. So what is a QR code? It’s a tool that provides an easy to use method for your donors to give directly to your donation pages. And you can also use it to have them connect to your website. For example, you could scan that QR code right there and it’s going to take you back to this donation page, again, this is a fictional page. So please do not fill out the form. Don’t make a donation on it. But if you wanted to check out to see how that works, you know, all you have to do is pull your phone up, scan it, it’ll take you right to the page. Use those QR codes and your printed mailings, you know, hopefully, gone are the days of having to wait for the donor to open your letter, write a check, mail it back entered into your database. Hopefully, with your letters, you’re sending some little slip for them to also fill out so that way you know exactly what appeal they’re responding to. Otherwise, you’re making a guess. And then putting that information into the system via imports, gift batch or a manual process. By having the QR code, they get the letter, they scan it, they donate it, a couple minutes later, it’s sitting in your database, couple of days later, the money’s in your account. So this can hopefully save your team time. And because they don’t have to work on all that data entry. And also, it makes sure that the codes are correct every time. You can also put your QR codes up in your community. If you have posters that you want to put on local bulletin boards, for example, in a grocery store near me, I’ve seen some local nonprofits and they have volunteer forms. They’ve got donation posters, you know, they’ve got QR codes, they’ve got tearaway slips. And they’re they’re using their community to spread the word about their mission. You can also use QR codes in your digital communications, if you do so, definitely recommend include a clickable link. So for example, you know, my QR code doesn’t want to scan for some reason, maybe I’ve got a thumbprint smudge on my camera, and I can still click and I can still load that form.
And now, you know if you already doing a perfect user. Yeah, people have asked for it, we have built it. There is now a free QR code generator available not only in DonorPerfect, but also in the online forums and in the knowledge base. So in the form, if you click on Share, there’s a QR code button that appears just have to click on that entering the link for the form.
And it has downloaded the QR code onto my computer and I can start putting that wherever I want. If you are in DonorPerfect, you can go under mailings, mail merge.
And there’s a generate a QR code button down here as well next to the instant merge option. So you can download your letters, generate your QR code. And then you can go ahead and put that right in your letter and it’s just a regular image file, you copy it, you paste it, you’re good to go. And if you happen to be in the knowledge base already, you can check out the article What are QR codes and how can you use them. And that will take you to the knowledge base generator as well.
I’m a huge fan of QR codes. I use them a lot. Especially now post pandemic, a lot of restaurants are using QR codes. And you don’t have to worry about somebody bringing you a menu. Honestly, a lot of people are using QR codes. So it’s a tool that people are already familiar with. So 152% increase in QR code usage in 2022 versus previous years. 57% of adults in the US have already used a QR code. So that means that again, almost two thirds of people are already familiar with the technology. The barrier of entry is super low, you don’t have to teach them how to use it. They already know how to use it. And if you’ve been to like I said, if you’ve been to a restaurant in the last year or two, you’ve probably scanned a QR code. And then 89 million smartphone users in the US have scanned a QR code since 2020. And that’s almost a quarter of the US population. That’s an enormous group of people that can be tapped to start donating using this tool right away. I see Joel Brinkley has placed very useful link in the chat for some more information about the the QR code. So definitely, definitely check that out as well. All right, so let’s get into our wrap up and then we can turn it over to a q&a. So one change you may have noticed as we were working with the new forms is They don’t use the same review and acceptance center or rack that you may be familiar with from the classic forms button instead have a brand new report in your DonorPerfect system called the DonorPerfect donation forms summary report. You can use this report to see who is giving online, you can see which forms are getting the most traffic. It showcases key data including payment types, transaction IDs, which is an excellent way to reconcile with your gateway. And whether or not that gift is part of a monthly giving pledge. And for those of you with scheduled reports, this can be scheduled to run daily, weekly or monthly, allowing you to keep track of this information automatically. So if we go into DonorPerfect.
Again, this is a financial report, donation DonorPerfect donation form summary. And I would recommend just keyword searching forms. If you can’t find it, it’ll pop right up for you.
We can run this report. And for the last look, we’ll go May of this year to present run the report
and we have the name of the donor, we have the name of the form. So we can see I’ve got a few and last summer of love 2023 donations, we can see the date the donation came in, we can see the amount whether it’s a monthly gift or not. If it is, clicking on that will take us into the pledge itself. So we can see the details of that pledge. So you can see the gift type payment method. So the gift type will be credit card in most cases. And then the payment type of let you know which card transaction ID in case you ever need to reconcile with your processing gateway, the solicitation assigned by the form and the general ledger code. And then it also provides you with a summary where you can see the total number of donors total number of donations and the amount of money raised. If you need to email this to your counting team, click on the Send button. And again, if you have access to the scheduled reports option, you can have it schedule out to send automatically so if you want to get a weekly update, and you’re not somebody that spends a lot of time in DonorPerfect it go in there and set it up or have a co worker sign in and then send that report out to you on a weekly basis.
So our takeaways from today, use the new DonorPerfect Forms to create easy to use and easy to share donation pages at their drag and drop. You don’t have to remember if something’s on their basics, or if it’s under fields and items, you just click on the tool that you want to make a change to, you want to edit those gift amounts, click on the gift amount, you want to add a new field, drag and drop it to the exact spot you want. Make sure to include impact statements, again, that can really drive donations from younger donors, and include PayPal. And again, so many people are using PayPal, whether we say it was like a third of all of all people in the US were using PayPal. And that’s a that’s a huge amount of people using one tool, include that your donations are likely to increase. And again, create those QR codes. And especially if you are an organization that still does a lot of physical mailings, it’s a great way to try to start transitioning donors from writing checks and tearing away you know, the little code slips that you can use to put your information into the database accurately and get them moved online. You know, it might could be a great way to get people to sign up for memberships. Great way to get people to sign up for monthly giving and get the money flowing into your account faster. So at this time, my colleague Jonathan is going to rejoin me it’s going to take a look at the q&a options and we’ll we’ll take care of some folks questions.
Shawn, thank you so much. That was a great session. And I love to see so much activity in the chat. Not only just great questions coming in, but also I love to see users of gender perfect, interacting with each other and answering each other’s questions. There were some great questions in the q&a. Please don’t hesitate into You asking your questions, both in the live chat. And in the q&a. We’ll do our best to answer as many questions as we can. But we might not be able to get to everybody. So some Can you see the q&a as well? If not, I’m going to read some questions out loud for you.
I can see it. Feel free
to read them out, though. So I did see a few questions get and get asked by multiple different people. So some of those I’m going to highlight. So there was a question about how many DonorPerfect forms you can create at once. Talk to us about that.
My understanding is there is not an upper limit. I mean, we store everything on a server. So if you somehow create a billion forms, you know, we might have to ask you to pump the brakes on that. But as far as you know, functionally, you can create as many online forms as you need.
I love the billion is the example. Yeah. So there’s, I don’t think there’s a set limit. But you can essentially, make as many as you as you’ll need. I got this question a few times as well. So how often should you change or update your online form? Should you do a new one for each new campaign or solicitation? So this is looking at some, like best practices for your for your forms?
Yeah, no, this is a great question. So for kind of your standard donation page, I would recommend kind of like what we say with mailings, and with receipts, you want to you want to have some pretty regular updates, and change your banner image, change up some of the text a little bit, you know, we want to keep it fresh, especially for people that are coming back to your forms or making donations multiple times. Because you want your donors to know that you’re putting the effort in, you know that you’re that you’re not just going to rely on the same tactic over and over and over again, the more work that they see that you’re doing, the more they’re going to appreciate that. And that appreciation will hopefully turn into you know, financial support, or at the very least, maybe there will sign up in volunteer. As far as your different campaigns or different appeals, I would say, each, each appeal or each campaign should have its own form, because you’re going to be changing the codes, you know, your spring appeal form is going to have different codes, then your mid year appeal or your year end or holiday appeal. So I would definitely recommend creating new forms. That way, when you get set up for spring of 2024, you can look back, see what your spring 2023 form looked like. And kind of use that as a frame of reference. Whereas if you change that form to your for your summer appeal, and now you don’t really have that historic record to look back on. Yeah,
that’s a really good point. So I guess one of the things to emphasize there is not only the like the setup of the form in regards to what it looks like, and what sort of like branding you have on the form being different for each campaign. But very importantly, is the item codes on the form. So if you have one campaign that has certain solicitation codes, and then you’re starting a new campaign, which will have different solicitation codes, on the back end, you’ll want to make sure you have a unique form setup that has codes that correspond with that particular campaign or solicitation. That way, every donation that comes in is coded correctly, automatically, once it comes into DonorPerfect.
Absolutely. And with the new forms, it’s really easy to change the logo, I just click on the Upload button, it’ll pop up and you can just grab the new, I mean, I’m uploading the same picture. It’s the only one I have. But it’s very easy to upload that new image. And I haven’t used Canva a whole lot myself. But I’ve had clients rave I’ve had colleagues rave about Canva. So that’s definitely a tool, shout out to them. Check. If you’re somebody who isn’t like me super savvy with like design, but you don’t have somebody else on your team that can do it. Give Canva give Canva look, and you can use that to create some new banners and you can rotate through those throughout the year.
Now, in regards to when someone is sort of like retiring a form, let’s say they have they completed their their summer event from 2022. And they want to put a new form out for their summer 2023 campaign. So I want you to talk about sort of the deactivating of a form because someone had a question about if they deactivate a current form, and they create a new one, what happens to the recurring donors on the form that they that they have deactivated? So just talk about what happens to those recurring donations when you change or deactivate a form? Yeah, that’s a
great question. So the classic forms if you deactivate them and somebody somehow stumbled over on that link and they tried to make a donation, it’ll let them know it’s the activated. The new forms at this time do not have at the activate option. If they are, if they exist, they are good to go, they will accept donations. If you delete a form at you know, if somebody has a link, it’s just going to give them your typical 404 not found error there. If a form is deleted, but somebody has a monthly Giving Pledge setup, that’s going to be just fine after the initial donation. All pledges, all recurring donations are handled under Tasks monthly giving. So if I started donation with the Endless Summer of Love 2023 form that I showcased. And let’s say in September, that gets deleted for some reason. My pledge is still going to run because at that point DonorPerfect is taken over.
It’s a great clarification to make. No one’s concerned about. Yeah, removing their form the monthly recurring donation still processes, because all that’s already been brought into the system of DonorPerfect. Yep. Can you bring Can you talk about there’s the the new forms, when someone donates, the record of the donation just automatically comes into DonorPerfect for those DonorPerfect users that are used to our classic forms. They’re familiar with the rack, which is where they review and then manually accept the donations to bring them into DonorPerfect. If someone was concerned about unwanted duplicates, do you have any, like helpful advice into how to reduce duplicates, or maybe just eliminate some of the concern about what that process is like since it’s automatically coming over?
Yep. So when somebody fills out the form, the donation will appear and doing it perfect. Within a couple of minutes, I’m going to try to put a test donation in here, just to showcase this.
Now, the record matching for the new forms, uses what we call fuzzy logic. So it actually is able to check a couple of different combinations of data to try to find the best record for it. And then once it downloads, it’ll show up in the donors record. Or if it wasn’t able to find the match, it’ll create a duplicate. So mine hasn’t downloaded yet, we can check that in just a moment. See, when it does see when it shows up there. It unfortunately, duplicate records, you know, that’s it’s part of the process. And people tend to be overall kind of chaotic, we’re messy, our data is oftentimes going to be chaotic and messy for that reason. So if you need to merge duplicates, you have the ability to do so under Utilities, always make sure you backup the database first. So that way if you accidentally merge the wrong person, and maybe John Smith and other John Smith are two different people, you can restore that backup. But otherwise, you can use the merge duplicate tool in order to find those duplicate records, and get them consolidated. So right now my system doesn’t have any duplicates, which is lovely. But if it did, it would let us know and we’d be able to merge them.
That’s good. And I want to re emphasize something that you were saying is that I mean, this new this process on the new donation forms where the record of the donation automatically comes over into DonorPerfect, it really is a much better and more streamlined process. And I just want to if anyone is concerned about like duplicate records being created, I sort of want to bring a little bit of like peace, to that fear that you might be having is at some point, you are going to have duplicate records. It’s not the end of the world because we have a tool built into DonorPerfect that helps you search for potentially duplicate records, and identify them and merge them together. It’s going to happen someone’s going to type in their name incorrectly or they’re going to use a nickname for their first name instead of their proper name that you have in their record and DonorPerfect. So even if you’re doing everything that you should, sometimes you’re gonna have some duplicate records created, and there’s a tool built in to really easily identify them. This process of them of the record of the donation automatically coming over really is going to streamline your workflow rather than needing to manually download the record that donations.
Absolutely. And, and even if you’re not checking your duplicates on a regular basis, I mean before you have your big appeal of the year or your big invitation, your big event you want to create like your mailing list, it’s always good to do a merge then and then December or January for our US clients February for our Canadian clients will By checking for duplicates before you send out those consolidated receipts, so as long as you’re checking your database, keeping on top of that, you’re gonna find those duplicates and get them taken care of.
Awesome. And Shawn. I know this is like pretty elementary, but I think we had some people like join the session late Do you mind just showing us from the homescreen of DonorPerfect, how to access these new forms.
So if the new forms are part of your donor, perfect system, you go under Apps, you go to online forms, and then you’ll have the drag and drop form builder. We are rolling these out over time. So if you don’t have access to the new forms, now just keep checking in and we will get them added to your system over the next several months. And that brings you to the new forms. Basically, the new forms version of the rack, like I said, doesn’t have access to all the same information, your organization name will be here at the top, it’ll tell you how many donations have come through how much money has been raised, you can edit a form, view a form, you can share it. And from here, you can also second way to add it, but then you can also copy a form. So for example, next year, if I want to keep most of the same themes from my 2023 form, I can just copy it make the changes I need to make, and I’m good to go.
That’s great. Yeah. So if you have the same type of event that you’re hosting every year, or multiple times in a year, rather than needing to start a brand new form completely from scratch, you can easily copy your existing form, change the name of the form and change all the codes in the back end. But all the work you’ve put into styling, the form, will will copy over.
Yep. Now I do want to highlight something that Jonathan just said. Right now the new forms are just for right. One time and recurring donations, we are developing event forms, volunteer forms, yeah, we’re gonna we’re going to bring all of the functionality that you’re used to, to the new forms were just one step at a time. So right now it’s one time recurring donations. If you want to set something up, for example, for your events, or anything like that, you still going to be using the classic forms right now.
Awesome, can you show us what so there’s a question about the like the impact statements. So if I’m asking someone to give, they can give in increments of 510 $15. Show again, where you can change the impact statement of what that donation is going to help with.
So when you are editing the form, all you have to do is click on your donation option, it’ll pop up here on the side. If your impact statements are not already visible under amount settings, you can toggle the description of gift impact on or off. When you create a new form, which I can show what that looks like in just a moment, it’ll ask you if you want to include the impact statements or not. And then as far as adding the impact statement, you just have to type in what you’re looking for. Like I said, there’s a maximum character length limit. So minor going right up on the edge of what’s allowed. And you want to keep it to the point, keep it focused and avoid using a lot of jargon and technical terms. But when you are adding a new form, the first question it’s going to ask is what kind you want. And if you if you don’t know what your impact statements are going to be right now you can go with just donation amounts, and you can turn it on later. And if you decide, hey, you know, we don’t really like to use the impact statements, they’re not really doing a whole lot for us, you can always turn them off
I know we didn’t get a chance to answer everybody’s questions, but we are going to wrap up this session. Now. This is going to end at 1:20pm. Eastern time. For those who don’t already have plans for the next session, they’re going to attend tracks one and two have sessions that are starting promptly at 1:30pm. Eastern time. That’s 11 minutes from now. And track three has a session that starting at 2pm. Eastern time. So that is 40 minutes from now, Shawn, any closing remarks that you’d like to end with before we stop this session?
Hope everybody found this presentation to be informative. Hopefully you’re walking away with a new tool for your your toolkit. Thank you so much for attending and if you haven’t already and download the slide deck I’ve got links to a lot of the sources for so Some of those statistics that I rattled off, so if you want to do a little bit more reading, you can absolutely access those through the slide deck. And just thanks for taking the time to join us today and tomorrow. We’re so glad you’re here.
Yeah, absolutely. We are so glad you’re here, everyone. Thank you for joining. Thank you for participating. If we didn’t get around to your questions, please reach out to the technical support team. And we’re happy to have a one on one conversation with you to answer all of your questions about these forms or anything DonorPerfect related. And we look forward to seeing you at the next session. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Take care. Thank you, John.