29 MINS
Givecloud 101: Online Donation Forms for Nonprofits
Looking to raise more through your online donation forms but not sure where to begin? Join us for a relaxed, high-level walkthrough of Givecloud, an online giving platform designed for nonprofits. See how Givecloud integrates seamlessly with fundraising CRMs to deliver a modern giving experience that grows donor generosity and increases conversions. You’ll walk away with practical insights you can apply to your online fundraising right away – with no pressure or commitment.
Categories: Expert Webcast
Givecloud 101: Online Donation Forms for Nonprofits Transcript
Print TranscriptOkay, all right. Well, welcome. Welcome. I want to say good afternoon or good morning. I know that some of you may be on other coasts, but welcome to Give Cloud 101 online donation forms for nonprofits. Presenting for us today is Samantha. Want to pronounce your list? Okay, so I apologize, I Read More
Okay, all right. Well, welcome. Welcome. I want to say good afternoon or good morning. I know that some of you may be on other coasts, but welcome to Give Cloud 101 online donation forms for nonprofits. Presenting for us today is Samantha. Want to pronounce your list? Okay, so I apologize, I wasn’t. You could tell me, and then I forget again. Samantha works with nonprofits every day to improve their online fundraising and donor experience. She specializes in helping organizations understand what’s actually working and what’s not when it comes to digital giving, so that they can raise more without adding more complexity. So, before we get started, I have a little bit of housekeeping to cover. I know the big question is, is this being recorded? And yes, it’s being recorded. It will be sent to all registrants later this week. We also have quite a lot of people in attendance, so if you have questions, please put them into the Q and A section to be answered. Putting them into the chat, it’s very busy in there, and they may be missed, so they – there’s a potential of not being answered, alright. And we do have a couple of extra helping hands here today that will be assisting with answering those questions, alright. So, make sure that they go into the Q and A, and that is all I have. So, Sam, you are ready to go.
Thanks, Lori. Hello, everybody. You can see me, but I can’t see you. It’s so nice to meet you all. Thank you for joining. I’m very excited to show you Give Cloud today. It’s going to be a very high-level overview of three of the most popular features that I demo daily: our online donation forms, the donor portal, and our event features. Like I said, very high level little overview of who Give Cloud is. We were created back in 2017 originally as an add-on to DonorPerfect. This past December, we have officially been acquired by DonorPerfect. So, I thought this would be a great opportunity to give everyone a little insight of what GiveCloud can do. So, without further ado, I’m about to share my screen. I have Neil and Mike here, as Lori mentioned, my amazing coworkers who will be keeping an eye on the Q and A for me. And then let’s get started. The first thing I’m going to share is the giving experience. This form is jam packed with industry best practices. It’s high converting, so on average people are seeing about a 60% increase in online fundraising after they switch to Give Cloud. Some of the reasons we’ll walk through behind this: there’s gamified engagement, there’s social engagement, AI optimizations. You’ll notice when I click on donate right away, this is our embedded form. A lot of donation forms, when somebody clicks donate, is being redirected and opening a new browser. Not sure if you know this, but you could lose up to 10% of donors when that happens, because they’re being redirected, so it might not feel safe and secure. Very important to have embedded forms, so it’s keeping donors on your site and limiting distractions. On this form, you’ll see a couple things you can do. You’re able to change your logo, change the theme color. You can even add a countdown to show donors how long they have to donate, if maybe it’s a campaign you’re running for, let’s say, the month of June. Optional to add a gold thermometer, and as you see popping up is social proof. This is happening live and in real time as donations are coming through. You even have the option for it to say someone from Ontario gave $22 If you’re looking to keep it just a little more anonymous on the form itself, there’s two frequencies listed: today and monthly. You do have the option: add in biweekly, annual donations. You can add those in as well. Now, these numbers that you see are not just default numbers that every single donor will see. We actually use AI here, and it’s a feature called Smart Asks. Just by turning this on, people are seeing about a 60% increase in their average donation size. The way it operates is in two layers. The first layer will look at a returning donor if their last gift was meaningful, let’s say around over $75 We’ll use that as a reference point, so instead of showing those generic amounts like $25 $50 or $100 we’ll generate suggested amounts based on what they’ve already chosen to give before. The important part here is donors do not need to be logged into their donor portal in order for this to work. We use a cookie-based recognition system, so if they’re returning on the same device and browser, we’ll recognize them and tailor that in an experience automatically. The second layer is looking at new donors, it will take cues from things like the device that they’re using, brand. Operating system to again make an intelligent guess on what will likely convert. It’s a totally optional feature. Below that, you can add different fund designations. You can have up to 50, so if you have different funds, if you have different campaigns that you want to allow donors to donate towards, you can add them into this drop down and map them back all to go in the left, the right spot in DonorPerfect. The ability to dedicate donations, and if you’re in the US, we now have DAF pay, donor advised funds. This would be powered through Chariot. They can click on DAFPA, they can easily find their provider and make their DAF donation directly from their account, so no more waiting for checks to come in the mail. Along with DAFPA, we also have a capability for Google Pay, Apple Pay, and PayPal, and of course, ACH and credit card. Before I show you donating with a credit card, I just want to talk about donor cover costs. This is the second area that we’re using AI. Traditional donor cover costs is typically asking donors to cover a flat fee of about 3% Give Cloud is capturing around 7% and instead of giving donors just a yes or no option, we’re actually giving them different levels to opt into. They could choose to cover most costs, more costs, minimum, or even opt out and say no. Thank you. More cost is checked as the default because 85% of donors are opting in to cover more costs. They can always click on the information button to get a breakdown of what their feet, what they’re actually covering here. Now I’m going to click on credit card. I find this is still a very popular way people are donating, but this is where the forms can get super lengthy. We still want to capture that information, but make it quick and easy. We ask for first and last name, automatically separating it for them. Email address is used as the primary identifier, and we use Google Address Autofill. This not only speeds things up, but it actually really helps reduce duplicate donor records, because it’s keeping the format the same every single time. Now, once they donate, we still want to make the most of the digital moment. So, after that one-time donation comes through, there’s still a key window of opportunity here to get them to become a monthly donor, and it’s a bit of a psychological moment. They’ve just donated, they’re feeling engaged by offering this simple nudge to upgrade their impact. We’ve seen a 10% lift in monthly donations. Donors can see that it won’t start until next month, and they have the option to opt in to $19 or $9 a month. At this point, you have their donation, they can exit at any point, but if you still have their attention, there’s a series of follow-up questions you can ask them, and it’s totally optional. We work with Double My Donation and Employee Matching Program. If you work with them, you’d be able to offer this, they can find their employer and match their donation rate from here. You can ask them if they’d like to be kept up to date. You can ask them how they heard about you. They can even be remembered next time for an even faster checkout experience. And on the last screen here, you can thank them. You can input a video, redirect them to go, maybe buy an event ticket or become a member, even allowing them to start their own peer-to-peer fundraiser right from this screen. That’s the giving experience. You can see just how powerful it is, but it’s quick and to the point, and easy for donors to donate. Moving along, the next thing I’m excited to share with you is the donor portal. Donors can easily log in with Google, Facebook, or Microsoft, or they can use a username and password. Once they log in, and once this loads for me, here you get to fully control what donors will have access to and what they can see in their donor portal. This donor portal is not required for them to be able to donate. It’s a totally optional feature, but the best thing about GiveCloud and DonorPerfect is we could actually turn on what we call the giving history. So, what that means is, if you have a bunch of data for, let’s say, Bob Smith, who’s donated for five years through your DonorPerfect forms, all the data sitting there, we can actually pull in all of those past transactions. So now that Bob Smith creates his donor portal in Give Cloud, he can see all his past contributions, even though they were in DonorPerfect. On the left here, this is where you’ll be able to control what donors have access to on the home screen. Donors can update their billing address, which will automatically update DonorPerfect. If they’ve created a peer-to-peer fundraiser, they can easily go to my fundraiser and see how their fundraiser is doing so far, and make changes and updates. They can see past contributions, so, like I mentioned, turning on that giving history. And seeing all of the history of their last donations, they can look at their lifetime impact, they can download past tax receipts, which is so powerful, especially around tax season. If you’re constantly getting phone calls that they’ve misplaced their tax receipt, you can easily send them here, and they can download it on their own. Under my recurring plans, if you have, let’s say, a monthly donor, they can easily update their monthly donation from here. You can even allow them to cancel, but also prompting, instead of canceling, why don’t you pause it for a month, pause it for three months? If they really want to cancel, you can then ask them additional information to capture why they’re choosing to cancel GiveCloud also does child sponsorships. You can easily view your child that you’re sponsoring, get timeline updates, and make changes as well. So, the idea of the donor portal is really giving donors the ability to have control over their own data without calling the nonprofit every time. I’m sure you have people calling asking, ‘Hey, my payment method is about to expire or has expired. They can now make those changes and updates on their own in the donor portal. We’re flying through this because I have nobody asking me questions, and I can’t see the questions coming through right now, but I’m going to move over to events. With events, whether you’re planning a virtual gathering, in-person gala, we make it really simple to register for the event and make it super seamless without piling on any admin work for your team. The best thing about our events is your ticketing and form will live right on your own domain, so your supporters are not going to get bounced to a third-party site like Eventbrite. You can easily control the name of the tickets, give a little summary of them, and the cost. You can also add fair market value, so if their ticket is $100 but their meals 30, they can get an instant tax receipt for $70 You can also put a cap on ticket levels to prevent any overselling when someone adds a ticket, you can also ask additional information. So, in this case, we want to know their first and last name, if they have any dietary restrictions, and if they’d like to be part of a raffle. But again, this is fully customizable. You can have a big text field that asks them to name all their allergies, maybe you’re asking them what size they are for a T-shirt giveaway. The options are limited here. Once they add a ticket and they scroll down, they’re going to fill out their information. Once they purchase a ticket, you get to fully control the email that gets sent over to them and what that looks like, adding an image, thanking them for purchasing a ticket, reiterating the event details, and they will also get a QR code. This will be their ticket to enter the event. You can easily scan them in with your cell phones, with an iPad, or you can manually check them in as well. If you don’t have access to their QR code, so you can see event ticketing and registration super easy. You can also do table sponsorships. I see it all the time. I have people use this for golf tournaments, for galas, for free events, and this will all push back to DonorPerfect. I’m actually going to pop into the back end of Give Cloud now. I want to show everybody how simple and easy, it is to actually create that giving experience. You could do this over a cup of coffee. It’s very user friendly. On the right hand side, you’ll click new donation form and giving experience. From there, you’ll give the experience a name. This will be internal. You can upload your logo, choose a theme color, and choose English, Spanish, or French. You’ll then get to customize the experience. It’s as simple as, would you like social proof turned on or off? Yes or no. You can add in your countdown here, the goal thermometer, any recurring options. You can see here the different frequencies you can add in that AI suggested amount, it’s as simple as keeping it on automatic. If you would prefer to set default options, you would click on customize and enter them in yourself. You can add an impact promise, allow for dedications and tributes, and those anonymous donations as well. This is all happening at the front, what happens after is up top here. You can have a sticky badge following them around if they’ve clicked on donate, but leave. You can allow them to leave special notes after the donation. This is the upsell feature to ask them if they’d like to become a monthly donor, turning on the employee matching, opting in for emails, the referral source, and of course thanking them. This button here is the donor cover cost feature. If you’d like it turned on, you leave it on. If you’d like to customize it, you would click here and go into your settings. If you’d like to turn on peer. Of your fundraising, what it would look like when they shared a social media email and tax receipt, and of course, your funds. So, this would be adding the different campaigns in that drop down, and then mapping it back to DonorPerfect. So, you can see the actual creation of this donation form is so simple. The next step would be to map it back to DonorPerfect. I’m just going to make my way over to my form, so I can show you what that will look like under integrate and donor perfect. You can map things back based on today and monthly donations, and when you click on this drop down, these would all be your codes reflected right away? So now the mapping part is as simple as going through and choosing your campaigns, solicitation, subsolicitation, and mapping everything back to donor perfect. I realized that was very quick, so I think now would be a good time to let me open up the Q and A, and we can kind of go through some things, and I can actually show my screen if anybody has specific questions. Neil, what’s the vibes been like in there? Let me see,
there’s been questions about kind of what’s included with Express versus a paid subscription. Do you kind of want to talk through that a bit?
Yeah, for sure. So with Express, it’s kind of like the paired-down version of Give Cloud. You’re going to have access to donation forms and some event features. What you’re really going to be missing out on is email automations. This is a really popular feature. This is going to allow you to set up emails. Let’s say somebody is a supporter for the first time, you can easily set up an email automation here, welcoming them. You have access to a merge tag sheet below. This is also going to give you the capability to change tax receipts and really customize those. The other thing, some other features Give Cloud has I didn’t touch on is we do memberships, which is only available in a paid plan. We do child sponsorships, text to give, point of sale. Those would be all part of a paid plan, so just sorry everybody, I’m just going through the Q and A. Neil, anything else that was kind of coming up?
Oh, we’re just flying our way through lots of questions in here, which is exciting to see.
Somebody asked if we have ach, we do that as a payment option. Some questions on how it syncs into DonorPerfect. It’s an instant sync, just going through, we do not have auction capabilities, that would be the DonorPerfect has ready set auction, but Give Club does not have an auction auction currently. I think kind of for next steps too. I was telling Lori this earlier, is if you are interested in a demo, or you do have additional questions, you can always reach out to your DonorPerfect rep, or rate on our website at Give Cloud. You can push and request a full in-depth demo to go into the weeds a little bit more, or to focus on some additional features that maybe we didn’t cover today,
do There’s a question here, Samantha, about how to add the donor portal to their website, and if there’s an extra cost with the donor portal.
There is not an additional.. there’s.. sorry, excuse me.. there’s not an additional fee. You can add a hero menu up top. Donors can easily log in after they do a one-time donation, but every single feature I showed you, when it comes to the two payment options, every single feature will be included in either the standard or the pro plan. The requested demo is free, fully, so when you request that, you’ll either be meeting with your DonorPerfect rep or myself, and totally free to dive deeper into Give Cloud.
There’s a question here. Curious about upload of donations into DonorPerfect. Is it automatic, or do we, we upload what we when we want? So I think you’re talking about the sync.
Oh yeah, you can choose. So, most nonprofits that we work with are just leaving it on automatic, but if you do want that manual kind of pushover, you can change that in your settings. You let me see. Sorry, there’s a lot of questions. Questions, I love this. I’m always happy to. If anybody has additional questions that we don’t touch on right now, you can always send me a quick email. I’m happy to get them answered for you. Oh, and there’s questions in the chat. I,
there’s a..
I can keep up with this. there’s
a question here, Sam, of does your event platform include assigning tables at silent auction slash live auction slash mindful slash raffle options, multiple event management platforms like Greater Giving, would love some training on this for my nonprofit, so I think you know back to the original question, does it include assigning tables and auction style things?
It does not. We don’t currently have the capability. It’s not so much an event management tool, so you won’t be able to assign tables and seats. It would be more the ticket purchase,
perfect. Perfect. Another question here about events: is the events integrated with the events module,
the events module, and donor perfect?
Correct.
I don’t think so.
It’s not,
no, no, I don’t believe so, Lori. I know there’s a lot of questions coming through, and I don’t think I can answer all of them right now, but that’s really what I was planning on showing today. We’ve, we’ve kind of got through it pretty quickly, do
okay, so that’s everything.
Yeah,
everybody’s good to go. I mean, I know we still have a lot more questions. I know I appreciate the majority being answered as we go through this, and you know, one of the things that I do want to stress, yes, we have hands raised too, is something that Sam mentioned, is if you want something in more detail, yes, this was kind of an overview of some of the areas, but you can reach out to your account manager, or if you want to schedule a demo, you can go out to Give cloud.com There’s a button right there in the corner that you can request a demo through, and there’s still questions coming into the chat. Okay, I’m going to give you guys a few minutes. If you have questions in the chat, put them into the Q and A, because if we pull questions to answer at a later time, they will need to be in the Q and A. I will not be pulling questions from the chat.
Yes, because I can definitely respond to these afterwards as well, if we’ve missed any.
Yeah, I mean, there were, there were some duplicates in there that I can tell,
someone was asking how it’s related to DP. So, really, DonorPerfect is going to be your CRM piece. Give Cloud will be your donation forms, events, membership capabilities. So, donor Give Cloud’s forms are really focusing on industry best practices and high converting. You do not have to use them both, but we just noticed such an increase in online donations when you pair DonorPerfect with Give Cloud, so you will not have to realistically live in DonorPerfect and Give Cloud. Give Cloud will be where you, you create your forms, your events, but you will primarily live in DonorPerfect and run all of your reports, and all of the data will live in there for you, just to clear up any confusion of the two,
yeah, there were a few questions where they were asking if it’s something separate, do I need to use this differently, but that was a great explanation for
it, amazing,
okay.
so hopefully everybody’s chatting in
some questions, Samantha, that might be good to go over. It’s just kind of the costs around the Git club.
Yeah, of course. So, there’s two plans: the standard plan and the pro plan. I always say the pro plan makes more sense for you, and will actually save you money if you fundraise over $360,000 in online donations. This, you can go with either plan, though, of course. The standard plan is $948 for the year. You pay that to DonorPerfect, and there’s a 2.5% transaction fee, that is Give Clouds fee, that is not Safe Save or Stripe. Your payment gateway fee is separate. Where the Pro plan, there’s a higher yearly, it’s 2007 48 for the year, and the platform fee is 2% So that’s where, if you fundraise over 360,000 the Pro plan is much better, because you have that lower transaction fee, both. Of the plans include every single feature that Give Cloud offers, so it’s, it’s not going to be, you should choose it based on the feature, it’s, it more comes down to cost, just going through, see what other questions are coming up, so when you’re setting up your event to go through DonorPerfect to Give Cloud, so you would set up your event through Give Cloud, you would set up your donation forms through Give Cloud, but because you’re mapping it back to Donor Perfect, all the data will flow right back to Donor Perfect in real time for you Yes, Give Cloud transaction fees, we so traditional donor cover cost is around 3% Give Cloud is about 7% So we do take our transaction fees into consideration for that. Yes, there is a Give Cloud platform fee, and there is a Safe Safe fee, so you’ll keep using if you have Safe Safe with DonorPerfect. It will be your same fee that you currently have, but then there’s the additional Give Cloud fee. Okay, so yes, everybody get your questions into the Q&A here, so that we can pull. Yes, Give Cloud is part of DonorPerfect. We are under the same umbrella, but still operating as two independent companies.
Okay, do
Okay, what do we think, Lori?
I think that so many questions coming in.
I know we
will be here all afternoon.
I know,
and they, they can surely get questions answered after the fact.
Okay,
I think so. I mean, you can sit here and continue to answer questions, but people will sit and wait for theirs to be answered, and we may not get to
it.
So, if you are done the presentation and there’s not much more that you can cover in this session. Then I think we can probably close it out if you’re good with that.
Okay, that sounds good. Yes, everybody, post your questions. We will get to them. You can reach out to me via email if you do have additional questions, and like I said, if you do want a more in-depth demo, please go to our website, choose book a demo, and then we can, we can get in front of you and go through it and get into the weeds a little bit more.
Yeah, somebody said that they want you to do
it
again.
Some people are just asking my email, it’s Samantha dot Cabral, my last name@givecloud.com so please send me emails. Happy to get them answered for you, and then yeah, we can go into the weeds a little bit more, get all your questions answered in a more in-depth demo.
Okay. Okay. All right, so Sam, I do appreciate you presenting for us today. And thank you so much to all of you for joining us today. We hope that this gave you a clearer picture of how GiveCloud can help simplify the donor experience and increase your generosity and conversions, whether you’re just starting to rethink your donation forms or looking for ways to optimize what you already have, even small improvements make a big impact. So, mention this one last time, if you’d like to see GiveCloud in more detail, especially, you know, speaking to someone one on one about your organization, sometimes it makes it easier to understand. You can reach out to your account manager, or again, you can schedule a demo by going out to givecloud.com All right, so thank you again for spending part of your day with us. I know as nonprofits it’s very difficult to get time away, but we do hope to see you in some future sessions.
Thanks, everybody. Have a good day.
All right. Thanks.
Bye bye.
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