Transitioning Your Online Giving to Giving Forms by GiveCampus
You’re embarking on a journey to unlock the best conversion rates for your donors EVERYDAY. We’re so excited to see the results and are here to help as you transition to giving forms.
Below are some recommended steps to help your transition go smoothly! Please note, depending on the size and scale of your institution not all of these steps may be relevant, may happen in different order, or you might have other needs and requirements not listed here. Many of these steps can happen concurrently.
Preparing for Transition
Schedule a giving forms training with your Partner Success Manager. There's a lot of functionality that is unique to GiveCampus and might change how you structure, organize, and streamline your forms. Before diving into site mapping or determining how many forms you need to build out, join us for a training and review GiveCampus University resources about giving forms.
Familiarize yourself with GiveCampus reporting and automation options 🗂
An important piece of this transition is ensuring that donations on your new GiveCampus forms flow easily and efficiently into your database of record. Set yourself up for smooth gift entry and talk to your Partner Success Manager about your school’s best option for automation. Depending on your CRM, that could be:
- SFTP
- API
- Importacular
- ImportOmatic
- RE NXT
Audit Your Current Forms 🧐
Take stock of what forms currently exist and determine which forms need to be transitioned and which are okay to sunset! This is a great opportunity to take a hard look at what forms currently exist and see if there are ways to consolidate those for both a better donor experience and to reduce the number of forms you need to manage.
Audit, Organize, and Load Your Designations
What funds are you fundraising for on GiveCampus? Depending on your organization, there may be a small handful, or hundreds and hundreds! We recommend making sure you have an organized list of your designations and back-end identifiers. This way, you can load them into GiveCampus all at once before you start building new forms.
Pro-Tip: Organize your designations into reusable groups. eg: to add all athletics designations onto a form with one click.
Create a Giving Form Template
We highly recommend that you create a Giving Form that you use as a “Template.” You’ll have the ability to “Clone” this (and other) Giving Forms, which will make it significantly easier and faster to build many forms.
Helpful Tips for Your Template
- Optimize for the best conversion.
- Keep an eye on your friction score!
- Make sure you have data necessary for gift reconciliation.
- Enable Recurring Giving.
- Include strategic post-payment questions that will support other advancement goals, for example:
- Are you interested in volunteering?
- Are you interested in making a planned gift?
- Why do you give back?
- Fine tune and activate your email templates.
- Develop a thoughtful, accessible range of ask amounts.
- Adjust form field labels, placeholder text, and helper text to be donor centric.
- Once your template is finalized, launch it and share with your Partner Success Manager and Colleagues for final recommendations and edits as needed. Once this is finalized, your template is set and you can start building your giving forms! Transition Time!
Building Your Giving Forms
Now that your template is complete, you can ‘Clone’ your template to create each new form! Below are some things to consider adjusting for each new form you create:
- Form Name
- Form Logo
- Form Heading + Text
- Imagery
- Designations
- Suggested ask amounts
- Adjust email confirmation
Transitioning Links
Now that you have your giving forms, it’s time to transition the links on your website, social media channels, email signatures, and start driving traffic to your giving forms for solicitations! We recommend leveraging the unique links functionality to help you track the impact of each communication channel.
Celebrate!! 🎉
Yay!! You just took a huge step towards raising more money, more efficiently online. Take a moment to celebrate with your community! Check out this example from Barnard College:
Migrate Recurring Gifts
- Over-communicate with your donors:
- Remind them of the incredible impact of their recurring gift.
- Share the benefits of this transition! This will allow them to modify their recurring gift on their own, make increases to their monthly installments and update credit card and billing information.
- Let them know when their previous recurring gift subscription will come to an end.
- Create a special, recurring gift by default or recurring-only giving form:
- Direct donors here to set up their new recurring gift.
- Consider using personalization:
- Auto-populate a slightly increased gift amount and personalize the form based on their past giving.