With Multiple Giving Programs, should we have multiple donation forms?

Adam Lemmon

Got a great question from Leon during today's office hours phone call:

"We have multiple programs that we would like for people to give to. Therefore, we'd like to have separate donation forms for each program. Additionally, for each program, we would like to segment major giving onto a separate form."

Within Convio, it is possible to create multiple donation forms; however, in this particular case, I feel that the best direction to go, is to have a single donation form and then use Convio reports to distinguish between the different types of gifts.

Advantages of maintaining online giving in a single donation form within Convio:

1) The biggest advantage that this gives you is that no matter where you are on the web, you can always point users to a single place on your site - a single donation form - where they can give the gift they'd like to make. This avoids confusion and makes it easy to point donors to the right place.

2) Report filtering: you can then run a report on this donation form and use a filter (ex: gift filter) to isolate only the gifts that meet a certain criteria.

3) Each time that you want to make a change to your form, you only have to make that change in one place. If you have multiple forms, you'll have to update each of those forms individually.

4) You can create a URL shortcut that points all donors to this form (this is really a repeat of advantage number one). Directing donors to a single place on your site, will help you avoid problems like: "What if I have a donor who wants to give to program A but they somehow received a link to give to program B?" If all donors are sent to the same form, then this isn't an issue.

When your online giving program is in its beginning stages, it's always best to keep things simple when possible. Maintaining all online giving through one form will definitely make things easier to manage for you, the site administrator.

(feel free to reply to this posting if you have additional comments)

Adam