Registration Form for Event with Suggested Donation

Daniel Bayer

Somehow I haven't had to do one of these yet in Online Express, so I wanted to ask you what you have done: We have an event coming up that does not "officially" have a ticket price, just a suggested donation. How do you all account for this on your registration forms - do you just have a "free" registration level and then ask for an additional donation, or do you have both a free registration level AND a registration level at the suggested donation level? Or some other way that I'm not thinking of?


Thanks in advance!

Faith Murray

We haven't done this yet, but both seem perfectly viable options. From experience I would suggest that if you want people to actually donate, you must make the additional donation amount very prominent on your donation page. The "free registration" plus "Suggested Donation" registration lines would probably net the most donations, but will require donors to enter personal information twice. If you felt strongly that entering address info twice would cause a donor drop-off, then you would want to add some text on the page itself (not the form - there's no realistic place for it) highlighting the suggested donation amount. Regardless which you choose, you will still want an additional donation line, for those who choose to donate a different amount (above suggested amount, we hope!).

Kristen Sewell

Daniel, we've handled a similar situation in the way you described - have a "Free" registration level with an additional donation field immediately following. (In our case we had sponsorship levels as well but placed the free individual registration at the bottom of the list so the donation field was next to it visually.) We used the field labels to describe what we were asking of our registrants. I would think you could do it in a similar way but with more specificity on a suggested amount. It's not on our site any longer but here's what it looks like in OLX:




Hope that helps!

Kristen