Classic Forms in DonorPerfect for Events Series

Where yesterday’s topic was events management, and we actually touched heavily on today’s topic of DP Online Forms 101, what we call a classic forms nowadays, when we were talking about events yesterday, of course, there’s the online component that is facilitated about these Read More

Where yesterday’s topic was events management, and we actually touched heavily on today’s topic of DP Online Forms 101, what we call a classic forms nowadays, when we were talking about events yesterday, of course, there’s the online component that is facilitated about these online forums.

And I said, Hey, Christy, Hey, welcome back. I am also a fan of the sunglasses smiley emoji. Very cool of you to use that one. Welcome back, Christy. And yesterday, I was saying to everybody that, Oh, check out one of our other webinars about classic forums. If you want to know more about them, I’m doing it today. Congratulations. We’re here right now talking about classic forms. Hello. My name is Sean Potero. This is what I look like when I have facial hair, and my dog was small enough to sit on a couch. Now she’s a 70 pound beast that thinks she’s still that size. I’m a training specialist here, usually working one on one with clients over zoom, but I get to do these fun webinars every now and then, and Christy’s already located the the chat feature, so I know that all of you can hear me, and if you do have any questions as we’re going along about today’s topic, please feel free to pop them into the chat box. There is a separate area for questions and answers that sends it just to me, where chat is going to be a little bit more open and visible. Today’s topic has gone by many names over the years, and who knows, six months from now, we might have a slightly different name for this. DP, online forms used to be called web link. You might see the words web link floating around back when this software was first created. That’s what we were calling it. And then we started calling it online forms. And then for a while, we were calling it DP online forms. Now we’re officially calling it online forms classic, regardless of its name, you’ll know it by site when I dive in here, into my database, where most of you will likely have this product. If you’ve started with this in the past couple years, and you’re doing payment processing with this, you likely have this there’s a very small chance you might not have this tool. It is free to get, though and reach out to the Support Department to discuss options on how to have it enabled. And we could probably get, I think I could probably get a donation page up in about 15 minutes, maybe with my experience, I’m going to stretch that out a little bit and go over all the different variations of form building, but still within a very specific context of a donation page. If any of you are new to DonorPerfect or approaching the online DonorPerfect forms for the first time, I want to make sure that I cover as much of the basics as possible in terms of a donation page. That’s what I’m going to be making here. Our one template will allow us to take one time or recurring donations if we want. So we’ll spend a little time digesting that and all of its different options there and then how we can find that data in DonorPerfect, which is actually where I’m going to start out. Before I even go to the forms, I’m going to pull up an example donor record and kind of plan in advance. Ultimately, on the donor profile, we’re going to have a gift. The person goes online and they initiate that transaction, eventually it finds its way into DonorPerfect, the database, and once it shows up on the gift screen, how do we want it to look beyond the date, beyond the amount? What fund is it going into? Is this a part of a certain campaign? Are we going to thank them a certain way, all things that we consider when we’re building the form that will later help us for data integrity. There’s a lot of different flavors with these classic forums, the DP online forums, we have certainly a number of variations on donations and memberships and events. That was its primary focus. Really was just taking donations. And then as the years went on, we added some versatility to it, and there’s a lot that they can do. Yesterday, we saw some registrations where I could have even put in a free ticket on there if I wanted to, for. $0 but monetary registration, certainly they can do a mailing list. We don’t even necessarily need to get a transaction from them to get a submission. It could just be that maybe you’re new to DonorPerfect, or you’re starting a new newsletter, and you have a simple page that they can fill out with their name and contact info. Membership, certainly, if you’re using memberships, there is the automated system where a gift of a certain value gets added for a certain amount, and then automatically, the membership screen on the membership area of the main screen is going to update. We have online forums that help facilitate with that volunteers more non monetary options, whether it be a volunteer interest form or a volunteer hour logging form that’ll update their profile with volunteer history. We also have some crowdfunding peer to peer options nowadays where people could create their own fundraising pages that then feed into your main organization page. No matter which of these you are going with, they are all essentially different flavors of the same thing, and they’re all going to be edited in the same way. So I’m sticking with a very specific example of fundraising, just taking donations and these other forms slight different variation on those they get edited essentially the same way. 

Uh, this is an outdated slide, because nowadays, uh, this apps drop down looks a little different. Looks like I grabbed the wrong image for that one. Shame on you, Sean. I’m going to show you exactly what we’re talking about here. That’s an old image. I’m already in DonorPerfect. Here we go. So the apps drop down used to be a puzzle piece. Now it’s nine dots, but apps as a drop down essentially holds all of the different softwares that are connected to your database, including our own product of online forms. It is technically a separate software. Connects very well to DonorPerfect, but it is, it is separate so we get there from the apps drop down, and now it’s possible you might not have this side menu. You might just have online forms as an option, in which case, click on it and off you go to the to the classic forms. Nowadays we do have a newer version of the classic forms, which we are not discussing today because the newer forms, they haven’t been available to all of our clients for a while, namely, our Canadian clients did not have this for a while. It’s still, it’s still a little new to a lot of our clients, and honestly, I’m not even sure if the new one is worthy of a whole hour webinar. You can figure this one out for yourselves, I guarantee it. But we might have more content on this in in the coming weeks or months. We certainly have articles about it. It’s very easy to use. Today’s focus is going to be on our existing product of online forms, classic, which has a lot more versatility to it, the new drag and drop forms. They’re nice. They’re drag and drop. It’s easy to use, but at this time, they just take donations. That’s it. You can’t do anything else with it. Can’t do volunteers or events or anything like that. Online Forms classic, going to be a bit more versatile, and you’ll have to have access to this. Online Forms classic, if you don’t have this, most of you probably do, reach out to the Support Department. They’ll discuss what options you need for that. And technically, you could have the online component without having payment processing, which is the other half of this, apps, online forms. These are the donation pages that we’re going to be building. But on the back end, there’s yet another software. We call it the processing gateway. It is a merchant processor. I like to think of it as the virtual, digital bank teller that’s moving money around. The online forums are going to initiate the transaction, but behind the scenes, the processing gateway is what is actually facilitating that movement from one bank account to the. Other. If you have anybody in your database that’s a monthly giver, it’s also the process and Gateway that’s handling it behind the scenes. This does most of the processing, so you’ll have to have this as well. The process and Gateway is sponsored by a Department called Safe save, a company called Safe save that’s under the software umbrella that owns DonorPerfect, and you’ll need to be doing payment processing with them in order to use the DonorPerfect forms pretty competitive rates. It’s roughly 3% if there’s anybody that wants more information at the very end, I can give you that transaction info depends on what the payment method is. It’s a little bit more for bank account transfers, a little bit more for American Express, but on average, it’s a 3% processing fee i that the gateway takes as a cut for the service. So both of these are going to be needed if you’re a little bit newer, most likely you have all of those. But some people just set up the database. There’s still all the reports and the mailing list and Constant Contact. There’s a whole bunch that you can still do with the database, without the payment processing, but look into it. Look into it if you’re not already it could always be going with a third party option. You’re not limited to the DonorPerfect ones. But what’s nice is, is that this is all connected. I’m going to be going through and creating a new one from scratch, but in the future, I if you have new forms that you want to create that are just slightly different, maybe a different color, or a different set of codes and amounts, just copy that old one. You’re going to save yourself a lot of time. No matter what, they’re all going to be edited essentially the same way. Uh, so let’s, let’s dive on in here. And as I said earlier, I’m going to start off by looking at the gift screen. Everything really does boil down to data entry. Feel like every time that I’m doing a webinar about something online forms, especially running reports, this is always where I start off. I start off on data entry. Pull up a random example, like I have here with Pedro. Now, if I go to the gift screen and I click on Add gift, here’s where I could add cash or check, or if you’re doing payment processing with us, we have an Instacharge button. I could facilitate that transaction right here. And now, if I had them on the phone, get those digits and process it. But we’re going to have these people, our constituents, do all this work for us. They will decide the date of gift. They’re going to decide the gift amount. But there’s a whole bunch of other values that we could consider here when we’re creating the form. We’ll circle back to Pedro later on, as we’re considering those different options and time permitting, I’d also like to show you how to do a test transaction, which, for those of you that are returning from yesterday, it’s the same process for testing transactions, whether it’s an Event page or a donation page. So I’ll leave Pedro open. Let’s go to Apps, online forums, and then online forums classic. We call this very first page, the review and acceptance center. This has all of our existing forms that have ever been created. If I want to view them, like my barktober form that I made yesterday for an event, I can just click on the name of it, and it’ll open it up and show us how it looks in real time. Anything that is set to active. Well, if they have access to this link, they could certainly put a transaction through it. Anything that’s in test is just going to be using fake transactions. And to the right of all these forms, I have my option to delete, edit or copy. I would advise against deleting, though, let’s say pause for the cause 2024 that’s our event that is wrapped up. Instead of deleting it, what I would say to do is set it to active, if it isn’t already and then what you can do is click on the Active button and set it to deactivated. You don’t need to delete it. You could just hide it from the list so that it is not always present, something I probably should do here with all these example forms. And at the top we have a toggle where we could always go. Back and pull on our old events or our old pages if we need to. Instead, I’m going to go with ADD form at the lower left. And the option I’m going to be going with is the very first one that’s here. If you haven’t had one of these created already. This is also where I would encourage you to start. When I hover over the image above this template, single donation, I can click on it turns into a magnifying glass, and when clicked on, we will see a preview of what this looks like. So this is what the form is going to look like. As a starting off point, I can change the amounts that are here. I can change whether or not it has one time recurring or both that are on there again. If it’s your first one, I would encourage having both options. They also have the ability to make a tribute donation, either in honor of or in memory of somebody not required. But if they are donating, they certainly could put in that information. And then even further, they could list somebody to be notified of, somebody who’s making, making a donation in memory of my grandmother. They might maybe notify me about that donation contact information, fairly straightforward. We’re going to need that for the billing info at the bottom, we have our option to help us cover costs, because DonorPerfect, the process and Gateway is always going to take 3%.

Say, I select $100 for the donation, when I get down to the donor covers cost amount, it will calculate what that 3% charge would be, up to $10 and they have the option to help cover costs by rounding up to cover that 3% no matter what though you as an organization are always going to be charged 3% even if your constituents help you cover those fees in a roundabout way. It does mitigate it, but it does not prevent.

Pay payment options, credit card or bank account. When I test this out, I’m going to be doing a credit card and billing info, and this is the one that I’m going to be going with. I would encourage you to check out some of the other templates. They’re all very similar. The multi donation one pretty similar. Instead of having one item that could be one time or monthly, could have multiple different options on it, then we have our sign ups and surveys, mailing list, volunteer applications. This will update information on the main screen with their interests and address our logging. Will actually log their hours on the other screen. And then we have a couple survey forms as well. These are interesting the organization rating forms. They do have the ability to be anonymous. And the way that these work the survey ones is essentially it creates a donor ID in your database. It creates a new profile for the survey. It doesn’t actually attach it. If I went to one of these survey pages and filled it out. It want to go to my profile. It would go to the organization rating profile, and I could view it from there. And then we have events which check out our future and pre recorded webinars about events. We talked about this yesterday, many different flavors on this. If you have the add on of events manager, of events management, there is an additional template option that you have here that helps keep things organized, and then a handful of membership ones. If you are utilizing a membership program, me, I’m going to be going with single donation. I’m going to select it and click, use that one. We are donation form. Make sure that you select your payment options right here and now. If I forget to select Check when the form is being created, there isn’t a way for me to add it after the fact. We could limit this to just recurring or just one time again. If it’s your first time, I would leave both on, and we can have a email address in here for a confirmation. Uh, Mike. Colleague, Arlene, is set here already to receive that notification where it’s just going to be some tips and tricks about designing the online forms, which I’ll be walking through now. Hey, there we go. It is now active. Anybody that has access to this link right here could put a transaction through this. This is just the starting off point. I’m going to leave this example open over here. While I design it, we’ll see the end result of that customization. From here, I can continue to form.

It’s broken down into three different sections. Mostly, we’re going to be working underneath the basics. We can design everything with these options here on the left hand side, starting off with the header and footer. This is what we have now, so I’m gonna have to change that so it’s on brand, and the footer already does have information in it, or at least for all of you, it’s gonna have the privacy policy and the terms and conditions. You could modify it if you wanted, if you have your own terms and conditions you wanted to add. Also, maybe not a bad idea to have some contact information. Not everybody’s tech savvy. People get frustrated by these donation forms and I just want to speak to a person, and not a bad idea to have some contact information on there for those people. So let’s edit the header and footer. Let’s start off by removing this image that says your logo or image. I can click on it and then use the trash can icon to remove it, and then I can use these editing options at the top. So very simple and basic, a word processor here, bold, italicize, underline, six different fonts I can add in an image, as long as it’s a jpeg or a png. Clicking on this icon from here, if I click on drop image or click it’s going to open up my file explorer, where I can find my image and select it. But if this isn’t your organization’s first time with the forms, what you can do is go over to browse and it’s going to remember all of the images that have previously been used for anything that is banner sized. You can click on the image to then click and drag it very similar to a Word document or most emails. I can also change the size of it underneath of it for anything that is banner shaped 800 pixels, usually fits perfectly left to right. You can also insert insert videos, although a lot of research shows that the longer we make these videos, if you put something at the top, people get distracted, less likely they are to get to the donation side of things. And I am going to be frantically, periodically, saving on these online forms, classic, having memories of Microsoft Word in the 90s that didn’t auto save. Same thing here. There is no auto saving going on. Make sure you are occasionally clicking on save, because we will get timed out here. I believe it’s get exactly how long it takes for us to sign out, but if I’m inactive, it will sign me out eventually, and I will lose my work if I don’t save which I’ve done. And I can go back to my example, probably not the best image to use, very low definition, expanded. It looks a little blocky there. Low definition.

I can click on the image, and then the first sub option is replace, which is not behaving. Let’s grab another image here. Oh, hey, there’s more pictures of my dog. Gotta incorporate pictures of your dog when you’re streaming work content. Here we go. I think this one’s better, and let’s make it 800 There we go. I think that’s looking good. I’m. Back to our preview just to verify and certainly better quality than the last one, but that’s just the first page. I This has three pages. The second page would confirm what we entered on the first and then the last page is a receipt page. And using this toggle for pages, I could technically have different headers on each of the pages, and oh, a big thank you at the receipt page. And you know, maybe prompts to please verify your information below on the confirmation page. But if it’s all just going to be the same, you can customize the header for the first page, the donation page, and then save to all pages. It’ll give me a warning that it’s going to overwrite whatever’s there. That’s fine. Then we have the page footer. A lot of people will just leave this as is, but you can edit it, and if you are going to edit it to include some contact information, like we’ve done here, I would choose this option down here to edit in system settings and then show footer editor, and you will already have this generic, safe save payment processing terms and conditions. Beneath that, I would have some type of internal contact information very rarely, but it does happen that a constituent of one of yours will reach out to DonorPerfect support, but we can’t help them directly. We have to point them back towards you, and certainly for people that aren’t as tech savvy, this is going to still ensure that they stay a constituent and can donate if they can get somebody by email or over the phone or see it might even be the case that they are a big spender and they want to do a wire transfer. Can’t facilitate that through the online forms, but I have Sean McClellan’s email down here. He can reach out to a fundraising officer to discuss all of their options.

That is our header and footer, starting to get this form a little bit more on brand for us. From here, we can move on to style your form, where really, once we go to style your form, my mouse is going right over to launch form styler and clicking it to open it up. And this is where we’re going to design our form. And I say that because the other two options that are on here are problematic. Here’s a check box that makes your form mobile responsive, the classic forums, pre dates, mobile internet scrolling mostly, and some changes had to be made to this so that it looks normal when you’re viewing it on a cell phone. Don’t uncheck this box. Leave that checked. The other thing I would encourage you to ignore is the CSS code behind the scenes, cascading style sheet, programming languages, what is making the magic happen for this form? I I don’t know any of this programming language, neither the does the support department know it. If you are a web designer or know somebody that knows it, have at it. But if you break it and something goes wrong, we won’t be able to fix it for you. We can help you start over fresh with a new one. But we do have that option that’s there most of us, though, we’re just going to be going right to launch form styler, and here we can pick our colors and our font and all that good stuff. There’s really two main options. You could go with option one, where we have themes, we have a preview here on the right, and see how some of these different themes are selected. And then we can go with one of these color schemes to very quickly get something that is a little less boring than what we start out with. But note notice here, I mean, I have my header image in. It’s saved, but our preview is not showing it, and that is always going to be the case. I this preview is not going to be an exact representation of what your form will look like, but it does have all of the same elements. It’s not until I click on save and close and then I refresh the page, do we see how it actually looks I’m. Uh, but going back here, back to launch forum styler, instead of using themes, we could go with customizations, which, if you have the free time, I would encourage you to maybe play around with this a little bit, where, if you see a color on this form, you can change it or pick what it’s going to be. The only color that you can change is on required fields. Required fields are always going to be a red asterisk. But everything else, you can change the background gradient color.

You know, the starting off point is mostly grays, textures, colors, backgrounds, play around with it. See what you like, what you don’t like I you can use the little color selector wheel to pick your color, but if you know your color values, you could also punch them in here as well for background gradient, though I were a fan of linear tends to draw the eye down. When we have a darker color at the bottom and lighter on the top, people are more likely to scroll down and continue to finish the form. Really the big hurdle that I see people run into is changing the font color and then that meshing, you know, not meshing well with whatever their background is. But you can change all this, the section headers and even the buttons. When I hover over these buttons, if I wanted them to be a different color, I certainly could do that if I wanted.

Then save and close and then go back to your separate tab where you have your real live form open and refresh it. Since that preview is slightly inadequate, it’s not going to show us how it actually looks. Still get your eyes on that.

Absolutely. For fonts, yeah. Norma, good question for fonts and launch your form styler. Where is that option? Here we go, font color, so customizations overall page and body form. And then second to last option is going to be your font color. And then from there we have RGB, HSB and hex code, if that answers your question, Norma, I believe it does. And font color, this should control all font for all text section headers, though they also have a separate font color for those as well. So be mindful of that. And be mindful of your background color. If you’re changing it from white or, you know, just make sure it’s not blending into each other sections or sections no font there. And then your buttons. Your buttons, the text color is going to be either white or dark gray on the buttons, but you could change the color of the button so it’s more on brand. Oh, what are our font style options? I think there might be one or two more than are on the header options. Serena, Arial, Open Sans, Palatino types, Times New Roman, Impact, Veranda, Georgia and Tahoma

High School me loved Veranda on a report, they wanted Times New Roman that was a Veranda guy. You’re welcome. You’re very welcome. And once you’re content with all of this, you can save and close or if you want to start fresh, you can click on Restore previous version. If you just want a blank slate. All right, onward and forward. When a transaction is successful, as we’d expect, the person is going to get a confirmation email, but down in set email options, we can also design the email that they’re going to get. Caveat here for my Canadians in the audience, anybody in. That is based out of Canada is going to have a separate tab for a PDF receipt. If you are Canadian using the classic forms, please reach out to the support department to make sure that you have everything set up appropriately for that. There’s some additional bells and whistles that come with our Canadian setups so that they are compliant with Canadian Revenue Agency.

What is the same for all countries, though, is this part we have the ability to edit the email itself. Same exact options as the header and footer editor with one addition, there is a Insert Merge Field button at the top right where I could use any of the fields, conceivably even fields that I add later on, I could use that as a merge field. If I go to show more settings, who should get this email? Person completing the form. We’re going to leave that checked off. Certainly they should get it. And something I would encourage you to do is to blind copy yourself internally these very specific emails that are coming out of the classic forms. They can’t be reproduced. There’s other emails that the database DonorPerfect can send now, right from here, maybe thank donor send an email, but this very specific one, it’s one and done, so if they accidentally delete it or lose it, being blind copied internally is going to help, because you’ll have that exact copy that you can then forward over. When should we send the email? When payment is submitted, leave that there include item details. Leave that turned on as well. Beneath this email that we can edit is going to be a section with item details, the amount that they donated, if it was, if it was a recurring donation, if so, what was the frequency I did? They pick a certain fund to donate to? Those are the item details. We’re going to leave that checked off, that should always be included.

And then we have set item codes, set item codes for our donation information, all of these options here and these drop downs are all relating to this right here this donation information. This is the donation information in question. Your constituent is going to decide the amount that they want to donate, as long as it’s over $5 they’re going to decide the date. They’re going to decide if it’s one time or if it’s recurring, and maybe what the frequency is going to be, and if it’s going to be a tribute, they decide all of that. But you have the opportunity to make this gift more unique as we’re building the form it all does come back to data entry, so when this gift shows up on a constituent profile for our accountants. Which fund is this money designated for? Is there a QuickBooks class involved if you’re using QuickBooks? Not everybody uses the class field. Some do. If so, what value does it get? Is this donation page a part of a campaign? Do we want to classify it with its own solicitation? I would encourage it many do a solicitation option. Let’s see if we have a general donation or an online forum option for 2024 it doesn’t look like it. I’m surprised my colleagues haven’t come up with one yet. Let me add one. 

Christy, that’s a good that’s a good thought. Christy. Really, did we deactivate it before I go adding new codes? Willy nilly, that’s a very good point, Christy, because there’s a lot of cooks in this kitchen of webinars and this fake database of celebrities, and it’s very possible that somebody deactivated that code. And find out. Here’s a quick way. I can double click on the word solicitation, and it’s still it shows me all of the active ones that have a green check mark. And when annual appeals over, I can click on the green check mark, make it a red circle, and then it’s not an option for data entry moving forward, but I can still run reports on it or maybe bring it back into the mix. And Christy has a suspicion that maybe it’s deactivated. At the top left, I can click Show inactive codes, and it will show all of those deactivated codes. Annual appeal 2024 we do that every single year, and we can compare and contrast those efforts very easily, because those gifts are being classified with different solicitations. I can do the same thing with my online donation page and just kind of scroll through, let’s maybe look up some keywords like online, no web, no general, no. I and really, if I was being a perfect instructor, I probably would have done this first so we don’t have messy drop downs. Because what if Donna had done this already? What if Donna had used a general donation form, 2024, and then retired it, and now I make a new one. Later on, we go to analyze that particular effort, and there’s two codes. There isn’t consistency. It’s what really all boils down to codes and the consistency of them, you could create the form and not account for any of this. So it just makes a date of gift and a gift amount money’s in the bank account. Hopefully you’re still thanking them as well. But you know, the more detail, the better. Very good point. Christy, thank you for thank no genuinely, thank you. That is, that is a very good point. I’ve double checked now, we do not have a unique solicitation, but we will now general donation form 2024 save.

It’s being a little weird for me. Why didn’t I save? Let me try it a different way again. If I double click on the name of the field, it gives me all these extra options where I could also add General donation form, 2024. 

Let me save this and back out. Okay, we need to thank you Template field as well. How are we going to thank this donation? We could probably just use the standard acknowledgement for that. I got booted out. That’s what the problem was. Different softwares I was active in the online forums. Looks like I got booted out of booted out of DonorPerfect. Happens even to the employees. Let’s head back in.

Oh. Norma, yeah, refreshing the screen. A lot of the times that would that would do the trick. I’m no IT expert, but yeah, refreshing, I thought was a good idea. Christy, I’m with you on that. Boo, it and it is. It is a not controllable. I hope I didn’t lose my work either. Let’s go back to Pedro and see um, sometimes when there’s a weird goof like that, it’ll still take the option. Let’s see if I go to add new gift. Do we have? Aha, general donation form.

And if I double click it should only be in here once, yep, general donation form, 2024.

There we go. And for the online forms, I’ll say it’s our annual fund. I. Uh, we have our new general donation. Thank you. Thank you. It’s always I panicked the first time I had tech issues for a live webinar, but it happens, you gotta roll with it. Um, fortunately I didn’t need to go in and delete my browsing data, because sometimes that happens too. Uh, you gotta clear that out. Clear up the junk on the back end, but this is what I want the gift to look like. We’ll say it’s a standard Thank you, part of a certain campaign, put it in a certain class, and this is what ultimately I want the gift to look like. And all of that can be done and set item codes, and most of those fields are in here already. Solicitation is in here, and my new code isn’t, but it’s because the form page was loaded before the option was created.

So now if I refresh my page, oh, or maybe log out and log back in. Oh, no, here it is at the bottom, general donation form, 2024 I will select the No, I’m maybe not going to select the fund, because we have these income accounts, these general letters written out in plain English, something that I could do. You don’t have to, but we could unhide this field GL Code is what we know it as, but our constituents might know this is what’s fund would you want to donate to? There is a hidden column here of which general ledger, code, GL Code is one of them. But if I uncheck this, I this and a pop up it will allow me to redact this drop down so our people can select the fund they want the money to go into. If there is one fund that we like more than the others, we could maybe bump that one up to the top, get a little preview of how it’ll look. Down here, you could default it to blank.

I would advise against that just because we can’t make this option required, and we’ll save that change. GL Code no longer hidden. Let’s go back to my example and refresh and now what was a hidden general ledger. Code is now a very visible option that I could select from working with somebody that’s running a homeless shelter. They had their different rooms and their different family units and their different buildings and, well, not general ledger. They created a separate drop down for those, and then they added those to here, I’ve seen animal shelters create a drop down for like their holiday sponsored animals, and they had those in a drop down, and they could let people select from the drop down who it was they were sponsoring, not required, but something you could do. Everything else, we can lock in the solicitation code, the thank you letter, the type of gift we have, a generic online form option, sub solicitation. Not everybody uses that. We certainly don’t need to here. Same with with campaign, you know, campaign solicitation, sub solicitation, I have recommendations for how they can be used, but everybody’s different. You have your own coding schemes, as long as it’s consistent and you know how it’s done, you can then find those donations later on. Cool, so our amounts are still the default ones. In set item codes to the right of amount, I can click on View edit choices, and in this pop up, I can change some of those choices. Let’s say I want my largest option to be 1000 instead of 500 Well, in values to display, this is what actually shows up on the button. So I’ll start by changing 500 to 1000 I also have to change the value to store. Right next to it, the value to store is what is actually going to be charged there. Someone could have selected the $1,000 option, but value to store is 500 Yikes. They would only be charged 500 I’ve seen the reverse of that happen where they raised, you know, say, Now I want my 250 level to be 500 Well, if I change the value to store to be 500 Yikes. And they select the button with the value to display of 250 well, they’re getting charged 500 unfortunately. So make sure these two line up with each other. And the reason there’s a difference between the value to store versus the fam value to display is if you can come up with an honest and accurate estimation of what this money will be going to you can put in a little flavor text about how that money is going to be used have a custom little label on each of those donation amounts. I will say, though, that it would be best if you could try to limit your options between three and five statistically speaking, a lot of studies have been done about these forms, and when there are more than five donation options, people get analysis paralysis, and they can’t decide less than three if there’s only two amount options, people feel forced towards one direction or the other. And nobody likes that. Three and five is the sweet spot. I’ve seen 20 different donation amounts on here. Though there might be an upper limit.

I haven’t seen it, but we can stop at four and then save and refresh, and off we go. Let’s see as state we can leave alone. There’s also the type of tribute. If I click on view, edit choices next to that, these are always the tributes in memory of or in honor of, I could go back and edit the options for general ledger code, click, view, edit choices.

I’ve already narrowed this down, but we could always do it after the fact, if we needed to audit that and and is there a best practice for the order of donation amounts? Yeah, frustratingly, you might have noticed that when I have these top to bottom, like this. 1502 5100, it’s only actually going to display like this if you put text in these boxes, because then in our resulting form, it would be one on top of the other. The way it does it, though, is that it’ll go the first column, the first row, 1502, 50, and then bump it into the second row. So I if we wanted to have it go through logically when we’re at this screen, we would actually have to reorder them so that they’re staggered. I would want 1002 50 like that. Pretty sure I always got to refresh my memory on what that exact order is, because it does get a little wonky once you preview it.

I did that out of order, but you you get the point. You’d have to rearrange the the items in here so that it’s respected on the actual display. Unless you have what do we call these impact statements? Having more than a certain amount of characters, like having an impact statement in there will force it into one column, so logically, it’ll go top to bottom.

Uh, and before I test this out with five minutes to spare, let’s add another field to this. Uh, not everybody uses the class field, but if your accountant is using it, we’d want to account for that on the forms as well. Uh, Serena, you’re welcome. And at the bottom here, I have an Add Field button. Out of all the different field types, QuickBooks class is a drop down list. I’ll select that as the field type click on next and the DPO field is not a new one, it’s an existing one. So I can just click on this drop down, find my QuickBooks class field. Click Next Click Save when you add a field for the first time, it will be unhidden. Gonna go ahead and click on that hide button and select the code that you want to lock in there, and we’re going to see all these values come back here in a minute when I put it in a test transaction. Lastly, there’s links and sharing. No matter what this link at the bottom is always going to be, what the forum is, answer, land three, donorperfect.net, you could create a friendly link for sharing at the end. And we even have a QR code generator nowadays. All right, let’s test this puppy out. Yeah, there is because for years, Christy, I was telling people you have to go search up Google. Bitly, there’s a couple other companies that have QR code creators, but I finally have to, I finally get to point people in the direction of it and tell them you don’t need to Google anymore. We have, we have that option in here. All right, let’s find my new form. Let me see, oh, boy, what did I call that thing? Here we go. Donation Form is what I call. It. Very creative. I’ll click on the word active, change it to test. Click on it to open it up. A big warning at the top that this is test mode. We could do one time. Let’s do recurring. Say we’re going into our annual funds. Could have other options there. We’ll keep it at monthly. And we could do a tribute as well, but not required. 

So as long as I remember my fake address, I won’t get a duplicate record created. Let’s see.

Help us. Covers costs. Sure we can leave that on if we’re testing it, it has to be credit card, and it has to be these numbers, the number four followed by 15 ones, that’s our fake credit card, any expiration date in the future, a security code of 123, copy down that billing information, next verify on page number Two, and then submit payment.

And there we go. An email would have been sent out to me, a confirmation email. I could also print out that information right from here or share it on social media. Let’s go into DonorPerfect, and I didn’t use Pedro. Let’s find me. Here we go, and I believe we have automatic downloads turned on. So over on the gift screen, here we go. There’s that $1,010 and if I go in and edit it beyond the date of gift and the gift amount, we have our general ledger that I selected, the QuickBooks class that was locked in, the campaign, the solicitation, the Thank you. Receipt template all locked in by me, and there we have it. Those are your online forums, classic everybody.

If anybody has any questions, please feel free to drop them into the chat. Christy, one of them that you used had time limits on the code so they explained unless you had the paid version. Christy, yeah, reach out to the Support Department. And if that is still a thing, I would reach out. Because, yes, there used to be a version of online forms that had a very frustrating paywall behind it, namely, when I went in and I added the QuickBooks class for you. That is something that was paywalled for a while. It would show us the Add Field button, but I would click Add Field and be a 4999 for classic forms. There’s a newer pricing plans, and if you don’t have online forms plus or the ability to add fields, reach out to your account manager. They can probably work out some type of deal for the upgraded version. I there’s a very there’s a small chance that you were on an old version and then you were updated to the newer version, in which case that is going to be a setting, I believe, in Advanced Settings, and then you can check a box to enable it, but reach out to support. Christy, but point in the right direction.

Deborah, you’re very welcome. Thank you for that. Thank you. Happy to hear it. Happy to hear it. And Christy, Yeah, correct. So I used the same exact fake information, and as part of the record matching logic, it’s looking for my address. It’s looking for my last name and my first name and zip code, I believe. But if I had a new email address, it would have given me the option to update it with the new information.

All right, everybody, that’s all I have for you today, join us. Next week, we’ll be doing more, more free webinars. Won’t be made it’ll be somebody else, but this has been classic forums. 101, I have been Sean Potero, and you have been a great audience. Thank you so much. Everybody. Take care. Have a great day.