Donation form designations

Adam Lemmon

Great question came in from Katie at Free The Kids :

Question:

How do I make a change to the donation page that provides for a specific designation?

Answer:

The steps to add this to a donation form are somewhat complex, so I'll save the details for our next office hours session. We will walk through how to edit your donation form and add "donation form elements" to your form so that you can collect a specific designation for the gifts that are coming in on your online donation form. Adding donation form elements is also covered in the Convio training class. While it might not cover specifically adding gift designations, you can still get an idea of the steps needed to add new elements to your form and then we will take a deeper dive during the office hours session... you can view a list of the classes that are recorded on this page of the Convio Customer Center: Training Downloads

Adam

Adam Lemmon

Also, can you recommend which training session(s) from your link would help with designated giving?

Yes, the Donations class will cover the basics of adding new "form elements" to your donation form... while the topic of designated giving isn't covered specifically in that class, it will give you a good base for learning how to edit your donation forms. I'll cover the designated giving details in office hours.

Lastly, would you recommend we create a separate donation page altogether with a promotional link from the home page? Or would you just do a drop down designation on the regular donation page.

It's truly a matter of preference on your part. If you prefer to track these donations on a separate form, that can be done. You would need to copy your existing donation form and then as you mentioned, create a promotional link to that new form from your homepage. If you choose to simply edit your existing form, you would not need to go through as many steps, but you'll need to use the transaction report to sort through the donations that have that specific designation.

There's a lot of details to step through, but this is a great process for you to learn as a Convio admin: great topic for office hours. Katie, your groups office hours session is March 5 at 11am ET. I'll make sure to record that session and then will post a link to the recording here in this post. I'll follow up,

Adam