Guidance creating an Online Express donation form for a brick campaign

Hi Julie -  You can either run this through a donation form or event form; because you want there to be a possibility have more than one brick per form, I would recommend an event form.  You can link in gift or participant attributes to record the inscription on the brick, although if your brick has a set number of characters you will need to have an explanation of that in the description of the form as all attribute description fields allow for a maximum of 225 characters. For instance, our bricks can be inscribed with 18 characters per line for three lines. We often had to follow up with donors who exceed the character limit restrictions with their submitted inscription. 


In addition to this issue, there is another downside specifically for event forms and repurposing them for anything other than an event.  The form will treat each additional brick as if the user were registering additional guests, meaning that the user will be asked to fill in contact information for Brick #1, Brick #2, etc.  While there is an option to choose "same as billing", it can sometimes be confusing to the user.  


If you go forward with using an event form, you should know that you will be required to create an event record for your Brick Program.  Subsequently, once donations have been downloaded into RE, a participant record will automatically be added to the user's record for each brick they selected. 


If you do not have the Events Module or do not want to go down this path, you can set this up through a donation form utilizing either the standard comment field (which is saved as a gift attribute in the gift record), or a specific attribute you create and add to the form, for the user to record their inscription. 


I hope this helps! If you have any additional questions, feel free to post them here or PM me.  


 

Hi Julie,


We did this using attributes to capture inscriptions. As Sunshine Watson‍ said, the biggest issue was people not honoring a character limit. If it works for you an alternative would be to have a set number of inscriptions available. Your attribute could then be based on a table they could choose from.


Shaun

Julie Kizer Ball:

Thanks for the feedback all and especially access to your link, Sunshine Watson‍. This visual-learner newbie still has some questions: Was this a donation form or an event form? Thinking about the pros and cons Austen Brown‍ referenced. Did you experience people wanting more than one brick? Our donors might, so are "concerned" with having that as an option. Sometimes preparing for every actuality just adds more time not results. That said, also appreciate the heads up about people not honoring the character amount but not sure that setting the number of available inscriptions will work here so still thinking on that.