What’s in a URL?
When creating giving forms or pages, you have a lot of flexibility to include customized gift arrays, select specific Projects, offer a range of frequencies for recurring gifts, and more. And you can create as many giving experiences as you like, for each and every campaign or initiative your organization can dream up. It’s a lot of freedom.
But what if that’s…too much freedom? (Apologies to William Wallace and Ron Swanson.)
Sometimes, you just need to rein things in a bit. Maybe you are running a child sponsorship campaign, with a fixed sponsorship cost. Or maybe you want to have a dedicated appeal for quarterly recurring gifts. (Hey, it could happen!)
Whatever the reason, now you have even more ways to limit or set options on giving forms, thanks to the magic of new URL parameters!
Yes, those doodads and bits that you sometimes see at the end of a long link! (Ever actually looked at a link on Amazon when you’ve been searching for an item? They can get pretty long!)
OK, “URL parameters” may not sound magical. But their effects can be.
URL parameters can be added to the end of your giving URLs to set or restrict values on giving pages and forms. You can now use a Project Code Override to set a specific Project for any gifts made on a form, or just set a default by using Project Code Preselect.
But did we stop with Projects?
We did not!
You can also set the gift Amount, or specify a frequency for recurring gifts.
And you can even combine multiple URL parameters together, so you can have specific links in your fundraising emails or on your website that will se the amount, frequency, Project, and Segment for gifts.
Want to learn more? We’ve got you covered! Feast your eyes on this support article.
We’re Here to Help
Even the best software (not that we’re biased) can require a little training and guidance. And now, you’ll have all that and more right at your fingertips, thanks to the new help menu!
Just look for the question mark icon in the top right of the screen, and from there you’ll be able to access the all-new RaiseDonors Academy, with video training to help you learn all about working in RaiseDonors. Our library of support articles has written documentation and guides to supplement your learning. And check out our new Product Feedback portal, where you can stay up to date on recent updates, see what we’re working on for future enhancements, and share your thoughts about features in RaiseDonors. You can also contact our support team for more assistance.
…And the Rest
This update also includes a number of other fixes, tweaks, minor modifications, and assorted nudges. Here’s a roundup of other items released over the last month:
- Adding Projects to a giving form one at a time is easy enough if you have four or five, but what if you have four or five thousand? Now, we’ve added a toggle in the form and page builder under Project settings to make all active Projects available on giving forms that use the Project search box option (adding four or five thousand Project cards, however, MIGHT get tricky).
- The form & page builder allows for all sorts of customizations, and now we’ve added another: you can set a custom minimum donation amount! If the default minimum of $5 doesn’t work for a specific initiative (maybe a sponsorship opportunity?) then you can increase it and add a custom message to display in the event that a donor attempts to give a gift lower than the minimum. Try it out! (Go ahead! We’ll wait here.)
- Using PayPal? Now, in addition to having the option to enable PayPal from the payment block settings in the form and page builder, you’ll see it in the main settings page when creating a new page or form. We made it easier to pay with PayPal, pal! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
- The Postal code field on giving forms was not a fan of allowing letters in postal codes, which is fine for the USA, but not so great from addresses elsewhere. We’ve made sure that both numbers and letters are now good to go.
- Some users experienced an issue with modifying the frequency on existing recurring gifts. While this only happened occasionally, we’ve now fixed the infrequent frequency friction and found it functions faultlessly.
- Using a tab layout for frequency in giving forms was causing issues in some cases, with the active frequency not being highlighted correctly. Our team has made sure that selected frequencies will no longer shy away from the spotlight.
- We squashed a bug with email address validation to make sure you don’t miss out on sending acknowledgement emails to your supporters. (And whatever else you might be sending, hopefully to let them know about the impact on their gift.)
- We’ve made some updates to the CSS of forms to make sure design elements play nicely with your website. (If you don’t know what CSS is, this just means we made sure your giving forms still look good when they are live on your website.)
- Our crack team eliminated a bug that was preventing some users from searching for their Virtuous segments within RaiseDonors. Because it’s better when your systems get along.
And that's the list! Phew! As always, if you have any questions about these or other features, feel free to contact our support team.