Modern Fundraising Site using TeamRaiser/Luminate API Example

Your registration has a Designation question (Area of greatest need). How are you handling applying that designation to all of that fundraiser's donations? 


We'd experimented with trying to save a fundraiser designation to a constituent's profile (eg treet week gift designation would appear in their LO profile), but had some serious issues with reliability.  We ended up having to recode the majority of transactions when we tried to do that, so we redesigned our system to have a separate teamraiser created for each fund.  When someone selects gift designation during registration, it's really just registering them for a different teamraiser for each fund.  While we do have to create more teamraisers this way, we found it to be much less work and 100% reliable.  Having separate teamraisers for each fund (or branch in our case) has some other benefits too, since we can customize some of the settings for each branch on an individual basis now and quickly run reports on each branch to see where their fundraising goals are at too.

Where are you storing the banner images? I'm guessing in WordPress?

Initially we'd thought we'd have to do that, but there's actually an option to store a second image on TeamRaisers on the personal pages (graphic_upload2_file on the api page for uploadPersonalPhoto).  Keeping all data stored within LO was a goal we wanted to achieve and luckily we were able to do it thanks to this.

Also interesting that you default to an event gift form with links to participant search, rather than the reverse. Has that increased the need to do soft credits very much?

Last year our donation form wasn't as clear about where the donation funds are going to and we did have quite a few soft credits we had to do, but we've been able to deal with some of that by making the text about who you're donating to on the top of the donation form much more clearer/bolder and with a link to search.  We might still adjust this a bit depending on how it goes though, it's definitely something we're thinking about!


Let me know if you have any more questions!

 

It's a pretty big list, but I was surprised how easy it was to set them up with an xml list we uploaded using the api register teamraiser process.


Interesting solution using the JSON file for a few key participants!


For the gift designation, I think the issue partly was the implementation we had done up by a contractor.  It didn't work with gifts to teams and ended up only working (some of the time) with donations to personal pages.  Bottom line it wasn't reliable when it was actually implemented.  Moving things to separate teamraisers also worked better for branches too, since they can just get a quick report from their teamraiser for what their fundraising is at and see who of their top fundraisers had registered just by printing off their branch teamraiser report.


I'll take a look at BBCon 2019, great idea!

Are you using any WP plugins here, or is everything custom?


Everything is custom (except for some basic website plugins for instagram and the FAQ system which it didn't make sense for us to put any development time into given that there's great options available in WP).

Are you creating users in wordpress when folks create pages?


We aren't, since we have fundraisers who participate on different campaigns for the BC SPCA we wanted them to be able to just use their LO login for the site

Are these pages completely created on the Wordpress side, or are you populating everything through the API as it's needed?


It's all API/some CURL requests from the secure.convio.net/tr/yourpage when it's quicker to grab the data there than to have multiple API requests for different data.  This took some doing to get the speed up and make things usable.  I've been working on a side project updating the Luminate API PHP wrapper to have more useful functions/do parallel requests for API functions, so that was helpful here for getting data quickly!

If the latter, is there anything being added to the wordpress database at all when people sign up?

Nope, nothing being added! Our goal was to keep almost everything in LO.

How do you handle the participant center; did you recreate that in WP too?

We created a new PC in WP to do this, yes!  It took some doing but we were able to add some new features in and make it a better experience for users.


If you have any other questions let me know- I'll be working on getting an updated PHP wrapper out at some point this year, still a few things to streamline!