Power Session – DP Forms

Sean McClellan: Good afternoon or morning, depending on where you are. Welcome to our Power session on DonorPerfect forms. My name is Sean McClellan. I’ve been with DonorPerfect for going on about six years now. Started out in support, and then moved to training about three to Read More

Sean McClellan: Good afternoon or morning, depending on where you are. Welcome to our Power session on DonorPerfect forms. My name is Sean McClellan. I’ve been with DonorPerfect for going on about six years now. Started out in support, and then moved to training about three to four years ago. My favorite DonorPerfect topics when I work with my clients are database maintenance and reporting. Today I’m actually going to be going over the new DonorPerfect forms experience that we are rolling out. We hope you’ll join us for the workshop on September 13th. That will continue this conversation into more depth.

As a quick housekeeping item, I do want to remind everybody, to be sure to add your questions to the Q&A tab, that way I can see them and answer them at the end of the presentation. If you put a question in general chat, I’ll do my best to keep an eye out for it when we get to the Q&A at the end but it may get lost in the scrolling of the screen.

What are the new DonorPerfect forms? They are, in a nutshell, a total reimagining of our classic experience that prioritizes ease of use for our clients, and provides a modernized look and feel for your donors.

Here you can see just a quick example that I mocked up using the DonorPerfect forms tool. What are the changes? The biggest one is that we’ve updated the editor, switching over to a simplified “what you see is what you get” or WYSIWYG editing tool, that allows you to simply click on the part of the form you want to update. Then the corresponding editing tools will appear on the left side of the screen. We’ve also added a much-desired drag and drop functionality that’ll let you put those fields exactly where you want them, and it shows you your changes live.

There’s no more editing a field or item, clicking save, closing a window, clicking on preview, and then seeing how it looks, and then possibly having to do it all again if you don’t like how that turned out. Your impact stories are also going to be much easier to share so that you can let your donors know how their gifts help you, which is a proven way to drive engagement. People love to see how they’re helping you out. I think something that a lot of people are going to enjoy, we are including integration with PayPal and Venmo, making it even easier for your donors to support your organization.

Now, why should you use the new DonorPerfect forms? M+R Benchmarks studies have shown that nonprofits that use the DonorPerfect donation forms have a conversion rate as high as 38% compared to the industry average of about 22%. We’ve also included a simple toggle that lets you switch back and forth between one-time gifts and monthly giving with unique options for each choice. If you have a $100 gift one time, you don’t necessarily have to have a $100 gift monthly, so it can make monthly giving a lot easier for your donors.

I can’t really see anybody’s hands, but if you want to throw into the general chat, who here does a lot of your browsing on a phone or tablet? I know I do, so I’ll raise my hand. [silence] All right. Seeing some emojis pop up. With that in mind, I want to mention that we’ve also improved the mobile experience, which is important as studies have shown that nearly half of all website traffic occurs via smartphones and tablets these days. No longer you’re going to have to worry about a form that maybe doesn’t look quite right when somebody pulls out their iPhone or their Google Pixel, or their Note, or whatever device they happen to have.

It’s now easier than ever to brand and embed your forms with any browser. I can talk to you about these forms for the next 25 minutes or so, or I can show you how the forms are going to work. Let me just pull that up on the screen. Here’s a form that I set up. Sorry, let me go back here. Here’s a form I set up maybe a week ago. It probably took me all of five minutes. I’ve got a nice banner on here. I’ve got monthly as my default, but I can switch over to a one-time. You can see that I’ve got impact stories, which can vary depending on which option I’ve selected.

There’s a section where somebody can easily fill out the information about themselves, and it’s all grouped together nicely in a two-column format. You don’t have to scroll all the way through. You can select your various payment options. We have the offset processing fee. That’s the new term for the donor cover’s cost. Then down at the bottom, I have access to my contact information. If somebody needs assistance, my information is right there for them. Now to build that in the new format today, you’ll just click on our “create new form” button. The first thing it’s going to ask you to do is to decide if you just want donation amounts, or if you want to do donation amounts and an impact.

Again, we definitely recommend throwing that impact story in there. People want to know how their donations are going to help. Consider that impact story as a way to share what a gift is going to do to help your organization with their mission. Give the form a name, and now we’re in the form builder. The nice thing is we do have a quick little slideshow for you that gives you the 411 on what’s going on here. When you’re setting up a new form, I definitely recommend looking through those notes, and then you’re in the form builder.

One thing you can do is of course upload an image. It’s very easy. You don’t have to worry about figuring out the proper sizing or anything. You don’t have to look for the right button. You just click the upload button. One of my colleagues designed this for me, but now we’ve already got a nice little banner ad at the top. You can choose to include a title. My banner happens to have a title on there already. I might want to put my organization name, just to remind them where they are. Then I can go into my donation options.

You may have noticed here on the left that when I selected the item I wanted to edit, the editing tools automatically pop up to let me know what item I’m looking at, and immediately get me into the editing phase. I don’t have to worry about sorting through the basics. I don’t have to worry about looking for fields. The editor does a lot of that work for me. What I can do is set up my monthly giving amounts. For example, I can put in a $10 option. What does a $10 option do for my organization? A $10 option helps us shelter an animal. I can put in a $25 option. Then I can explain what the impact of that’s going to be.

You may notice if you’re keeping an eye on the whole screen, that it’s automatically updating based off of what I’ve entered in. $50 a month helps fight head overpopulation. $75 a month can provide lifesaving treatment. I promise I can type really well when no one’s watching. You can also very easily select a default amount. For example, if my organization, if we do a little bit of research perhaps using the gift range report in DonorPerfect, and we determine that $25 is a good monthly amount to default, we can select that very easily. You can also add additional amounts.

Then if we switch over to our one-time, we can see we have completely different values available to us. For our one-time gifts, maybe we still want to leave $25 as an option.

We can still keep $50 in there. Highlighting too much on my screen. There we go. Then for $100, and put that impact story in there. Then for $500, a one-time gift of $500 can help us prevent pet euthanasia. Over here, we can also determine a proper default amount. Again, if we were to use a report such as gift range, we can determine maybe what the most common average gift amount, or the most common maximum gift amount is amongst our particular constituency.

We can come to a proper decision based off of our own internal research. We also have a tribute section where they can make a donation in memory or honor. As we go through, we can double-check the other items. Now you can also add additional fields. Currently, you have to add a field from the gift screen, which we would recommend that you place in DonorPerfect first, following the best practices of our classic forms experience. I have set up a field in DonorPerfect where people can sign up for monthly updates. I could just drag and drop that in there. It’s already here.

Then in donor, the forms will allow me to find the field I want. Then I can customize my label. You can even, in the case of a checkbox, you can mark it as default. For other fields you can mark it required as needed. [silence] You can also drag and drop additional images. You can put memos in there. You can add in some drop-down fields. Really anything that you’d want to include on your form, you can include on the form. Under the form styler, we have a very easy-to-use background and accent option. If like me, you’re not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination, there are tools that you can use to help get the proper codes.

For example, for my background I’m going to go with a light blue, which is apparently a purple because I must have mistyped my value in there. Let’s just bring that over and we can use the slider. There we go. Hopefully I get the other number right. Then I have a darker blue for the accent. The accent color does also double as your button color. One thing you want to make sure you’re doing with all of your online forms is assigning the appropriate codes. That way, when your data shows up in your system, it’s already coded out for you. You don’t have to worry about running a report, finding missing information, and cleaning it all up manually.

You can just make sure that the form does all the heavy lifting there as well. I can assign a campaign code if this is part of an ongoing campaign. I can assign it to a general ledger. Of course, with something like a standard donation form, you probably want to keep it unrestricted, keep that money flexible for you. I can assign my solicitation code. Again, for an online donation form like this, I’m gearing this up to be my default donation page, so I’m going to leave that unsolicited, and you can assign a sub-solicitation code.

You could also add additional hidden fields. If there are any additional notes that you wanted to include, if you’re using QuickBooks, you can include the QuickBooks class. Anything that’s already being used will be marked very clearly is unavailable with the reason why. If you can’t find something, you keep scrolling down, the forms will let you know what’s going on. Then under settings, you can customize your confirmation page, again, using a WYSIWYG editor. For example, if I wanted to upload a different image, I can add that. I can go in here and I can update the message.

[pause 00:14:15]

You can include links in here as well. If you want to link to a particular page on your site or anything like that, like I said, you can include images, and you can update the text using some simple text editing tools. We update our confirmation page. Then, of course, we want to set up the thank you email. One of the biggest changes is with the new forms experience, you can of course have a default template, or if you have an email template already in your DonorPerfect system, you can tell it to use that email, and then when the donation downloads, the email is sent via DonorPerfect.

You don’t have to worry about building one email template in your form and then a second email template, and doing it perfect. You can let the two programs work together and just do one seamless email experience. When you’re ready for your form to go live, make sure you click the publish button. Looks like I forgot to include my contact details, so we’ll scroll down to the bottom.

[pause 00:15:50]

I guess it’s probably that org. You can include your 501(c)(3) information. Now if I click publish, again, it’s going to double-check my work, make sure everything’s good to go. Here’s my form. I sign in, I come into the form now. Hopefully on your website, you’ve got a donation button that’s front and center. Make it big, make it easy to get to. One of the things that we do as trainers is we provide advisories, and one of the first things we look for is we look at your donation page. We look at your website, see how easy it is to get to your donation forms.

Might sound silly, but even three clicks can be too much for people, so put that button front and center, make it easy to access. Then once I’m brought here, I’m already in the monthly giving program. That’s the first thing I’m seeing, and in a lot of cases, that’s enough. I can go maybe $25 is too much for me a month, but I pay for Netflix, I can certainly handle $10, or maybe somebody wants to kick it up to $50. On the off chance that they’re not comfortable setting themselves up as a recurring or monthly donor, they can still switch to the one-time option.

We’ll go ahead and stick to that $25. Again, we have that little monthly update option. If I’m not interested in the monthly update, I can uncheck it. If I want to dedicate the donation, and I can select the information, type in who I want to dedicate it to, and then fill out my information here.

[pause 00:17:57]

Fill out my credit card. Then I can confirm if my information is identical across both areas. If not, we give you a very easy-to-use billing section. Then I can choose to include an offset processing fee, which again, is a fully tax-deductible donation. If I’m giving you $25 plus an additional 75 cents, the donation is $25.75. [silence] Then we have the review page, gives you all of the different items. Then we click on donate. The nice thing is the donation automatically downloads into the database. If I go looking for my name– Give that a moment. Once it has a moment to download, I’ll be able to find my record right away.

One thing I want to highlight this you can update your offset fee message. The default amount is 3%, which is based off of industry averages. Then you can also choose to make that the default selection. We have a little bit of extra information in case you have any questions. Now, because I’ve made a change, I do need to make sure that I publish it before that’s going to show up. If you’re working on your form and you happen to open it up on your website and it’s not quite showing what you expected, just make sure you go back and click on the publish button. The saves happen automatically, but you have to publish it.

If you’re interested in including a link to PayPal and Venmo, you just click on the donation option. You’ll link an account and then you’ll get additional PayPal pop-up. You do need to have a PayPal business account. Once you have that setup, it’ll allow the two programs to connect, and now your donors can use PayPal and they can use Venmo. If you’ve had donors asking you in the past if there’s a PayPal option, or if you’ve been keeping a separate PayPal form from your DonorPerfect form, that can become a thing of the past, and you can put the two together.

Let’s see. Let me check. There we go. Took a couple of moments. We can see my donation has come in. At the very bottom, if I check my auditing section, it’s created by DonorPerfect form so you can keep track of information like that. I have my gift. Then sign the credit card gift type automatically. It has all of the different codes that I’ve added myself. The tribute information is right there.

Then my received monthly update field that I added is checked as well. Now if I go and run a list or build a constant contact list to include people who want a monthly update, I can use this as a data point for that. Then of course, because I set up a pledge here, we can see the pledge record. Under contacts, the email was sent automatically. I don’t even have to go into receipts to send an acknowledgment to this donor.

[pause 00:22:54]

With that demo in mind, how do you maximize the effectiveness of your online form? You have that form together, it’s a great form, but now you’ve got to promote it. One of the biggest things we can recommend, set up a monthly donor program. As mentioned before, retention rates can skyrocket to up to 85% with a monthly program. The lifetime value for a monthly donor can be up to 34 times the value of a one-time donor. Simply by getting somebody to click on an option to donate again and again, they’re more likely to stay with your organization longer and accrue more value for you over time.

As I said before, make sure that that donation button is prominent on your website. The easier it is to find, the better. I know a commonplace that people are going to look is often going to be the upper-right corner, so make sure it’s not hard for people to donate. Then, of course, you want to keep a consistent theme between your website and your forms. You want to instill comfort and confidence in your donors. You want them to feel like they never really left your website at all. This time, we’re going to go ahead and check in the Q&A section to see if there are any questions.

There is also a link I want to share, assuming it hasn’t already been popped into the general channel for everybody. “When are these new forms rolling out?” If you go into the Q&A section, there’s actually a form that you can fill out if you want to sign up for the new online forms experience. You can sign up in five minutes when the presentation is over, if you’d like.

“Is there an ability to add more than one hidden general ledger or solicitation code to these forms yet?” If you make it hidden, they’re only going to be able to select one code, but if you make it a visible drop-down they can select from a list. Each donation can only have one code assigned at a time per field. “Have conditional fields ie this only shows up if something has been checked, been added?” Sounds like that’s going to be coming out in the next update.

“If we already have DonorPerfect forms will this new format auto-switch over? My form builder does not look like this.” It’s not going to auto-switch you over, but you can sign up and you can use both types of forms concurrently. You can utilize the new form experience while also still using the classic forms experience. “Are you using PayPal now instead of SafeSave?” As it was answered in Q&A, the form uses both. If they are still processing with a credit card, debit card, or bank account, it’s still going through SafeSave as always.

“Will we be able to add multiple checkboxes to the form and connecting to custom fields we’ve created in DonorPerfect?” Right now it is just fields on the gift screen. If you wanted to add a section to your gift screen and DonorPerfect with some checkboxes or drop-down lists, or anything like that, you can then add them to the forms. Again, as of right now it is just on the gift screen.

[pause 00:26:49]

It’s going through. “If there are options for different acknowledgment emails for in honor or memory gifts, and will Canadian sites say honor with a U rather than without the U?” When you build the form, you can connect it to an email template of your choice. If you have different versions of the emails to use, you can connect. but it is a one-form-to-one email connection at this time.

We got, “What branding ability is there on the web form; fonts, colors, et cetera?” Right now you can upload images. You can put a header image if you have one, or just a simple picture, and then you can update the colors. Right now we have the background and the accent colors which use RGB and HEX codes or, if you’ve noticed, I was using the color sliders. If you happen to know RGB or HEX codes, you can use any colors that you can think of, or you can utilize the sliders to try to get that perfect tone.

I think this one will be good for people to be aware of. “Is there a manual option for downloading donations from these new forms into DonorPerfect instead of automatic?” At this time, it’s all going to be automatic and then the merging will be done in DonorPerfect.

[pause 00:28:38]

Then we’ve got a couple of folks asking if the forms are available in Canada. Not at this time but that is something that we are working on. Josh has mentioned that it is a high-priority item. “If we add the impact story in the form, are we required to consider the gifts as restricted or designated, or are the impact items on a form just examples of the kinds of things your donation would go to?”

Generally speaking, impact stories tend to lean more towards the latter where it’s an example. However, you can set up a specific form to go to a certain restricted code, and then make sure that your impact story is only tied to those exact items. For example, if you have a scholarship form, you can have each impact story be a specific level of scholarship. If your form is set up to be unrestricted, they can serve as examples of what the money could potentially go to.

[pause 00:29:52] Then if you decide to leave the impact story empty you’ll just leave it in there with the donation amounts, or you can choose to use a non-impact text template and it’ll just have the donation buttons. All right. Now, I apologize if I wasn’t able to get to everybody question but I want to be sensitive to time because we have another session coming up. Let me just pop the registration link in the general chat for everybody there as well. If you haven’t already clicked on that, you can find the link in the general chat. When the handout is made available there will be a link there for you as well, and then it’s also in the Q&A.

Thank you, everybody, for taking the time to attend the Power session. Thank you, Josh, for keeping an eye eye on that Q&A and getting through some of those questions right away. I hope you found the information here beneficial. Next up we’ve got “Is your staff a part of your story and connected to your mission?” As well as a presentation by Giftcloud, “Telling your story in various ways.” As always, no matter which session you choose you will not miss any content since all sessions are recorded. See you shortly. Take care. Bye.