Online Giving Personalization

GiveCampus' Personalization on Giving Forms lets you create a streamlined, customized giving experience for donors at scale, while ensuring your gift processing team can easily collect and reconcile the necessary donor data.

Online Giving Personalization: A Bespoke Experience for Donors and Schools

For Donors: Personalization means your donors feel recognized and valued. You can greet them by name and avoid asking for information already on file, crafting a genuine one-click giving experience that’s both convenient and personal.

For Your Gift Processing Team: Personalization ensures that even as you create a frictionless experience for donors, you still capture the essential data required for reporting and reconciling gifts. It’s a true win-win, enhancing the donor experience while meeting your administrative needs.

Why Does Personalization Matter?

Based on analysis of giving form performance on GiveCampus, we know that each text field added to the pre-payment form decreases conversion by 1.2%. Making a field required decreases conversion by another 1.2%. When we spoke to schools to learn why they were adding fields to the pre-payment form, most shared that they need that donor data to be able to reconcile gifts and update records. At the same time, we know that today’s consumer demands modern digital experiences where they feel known and that are easy and frictionless...maybe even a single click to give. We set out to solve both problems: how do we help donors feel known and give them a true one-click giving experience while also ensuring that schools have the data they need for gift processing? This is how personalization was born and why it matters.

What is Personalization in Online Giving?

Personalization transforms online donation processes into tailored experiences that streamline giving while preserving essential donor data for effective gift processing. This feature seamlessly integrates with marketing communication tools like Emma, Constant Contact, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, enhancing the efficiency of donor interactions.

There are two principal aspects of personalization: pass-through personalization and experience personalization, both requiring data uploads to GiveCampus.

Pass-Through Personalization involves the direct integration of donor data into the reporting system, with fields on the donation form automatically concealed based on the uploaded data. For instance, if you upload address information for a donor such as Jenny Smith, the address field on the donation form will be hidden for her, yet her address will be captured and visible in the reporting once she completes her donation. This setup enables a one-click donation process, with any updated information being collected through a post-payment form if needed.

Experience Personalization focuses on enhancing the donor’s journey by customizing the form based on their previous interactions. This includes personal touches like greeting the donor by name and pre-setting default gift amounts and designations according to their past contributions.

Combining these personalization strategies results in a more efficient donation process: donors encounter a simplified, often one-click form, while your team receives all necessary data to accurately process gifts. This dual approach not only optimizes the donor experience but also ensures data accuracy and ease of use for your team.

Getting started: Uploading your data 

Exploring the constituent section

Now that your data is uploaded, let’s explore the Constituent section. In this section you can search and sort through your previously uploaded constituent data by name, by email address and by constituent ID. This is also where you can go to validate that an upload of new constituent information was successful. 

I’ve uploaded my data - now what? Sending Personalization tokens via GC Outreach or downloading a CSV with personalization tokens

Now that you’ve uploaded your data, your personalization tokens are ready to use! A personalization token is a unique string of letters and numbers associated with a single constituent on GiveCampus. These tokens get passed through the URL and tell GiveCampus who the constituent is so we can personalize their experience and pass through the data about them you want to see in reporting. These tokens are unique to each individual and will remain constant for each constituent following the upload, unless multiple tags are uploaded to the same constituent (see FAQ below). This means that, even if you upload new data on a constituent, their personalization token will stay the same. The tokens will be located in the “adid” column of your exports. 

In order to download your tokens, navigate to your administrator dashboard > Personalization > Constituents. 

There are two ways to download the tokens:

1. Download *just* the personalization token. The tokens are created to work with any giving form or social fundraising campaign. In the top right of the Constituents page, you should see a dropdown menu. Select “All Giving Forms” then download the merge fields CSV. This should return a file to you with the tokens included. 

In order to personalize the giving form experience for a specific form link, all you need to do is add the url parameter:                                    ?adid=TOKEN_FROM_CSV. You can add this parameter to the end of the URL. If your form link is https://givecampus.com/campaigns/0000/donations/new, your URL would then turn into: https://givecampus.com/campaigns/0000/donations/new?adid=a6a2f58d-f878-4e0a-85b5-364e1e6cc7a1.

*Test it out!* Go to the appended URL address. When you land on the page you can tell if it’s personalized if the top of the page says “Hello FIRST_NAME”.

2. Download the personalization token already appended to a specific form’s URL. If you’d rather download the links for a specific form, with the personalization token - this is the option for you! Navigate back to the top right of the constituents page, and select the form you are directing donors to from the dropdown. Once the form is selected, click the Get Personalization Tokens button. The links in each row under the gf_url column are the ones you’ll use and send out to your donors!

Filtering your export

 If you need to download a report of a particular segment of your constituents (for example, only constituents associated with a specific academic department), you can use filters to do that! You can filter on two fields: 

• Designation Name - the designation you associated with the constituent’s record in your upload. 
• Tags - these can be used to label your constituents however you’d like. In the example below, we used a Giving Day 2023 donor to indicate they made a gift on Giving Day 2023 this year. This could be used to solicit donors for Giving Day 2024 using the same amount and designation they supported last year. 
  
  IMPORTANT NOTE: if you upload multiple tags to the same constituent, multiple tokens will be generated. Make sure you note this when considering the next section - uploading your tokens to your email provider. 

Filters can be used in combination with one another, for example, Giving Day 2023 Donor (Tag) who supported the Climate Project (Designation Name). Multiple tags can’t be used within the same filtering. 

Adding the personalization tokens to your email provider

Personalization tokens on GiveCampus work best with the following email providers: SalesForce Marketing Cloud, MyEmma, Constant Contact, Blackbaud Luminate Online and Hubspot. As it stands right now, the tokens themselves are not compatible with a few Blackbaud and products and all iModules marcom products because these products do not allow users to add links or calls to action as merge tokens. 

Since each email provider has different terms, you’ll most likely need to consult their help articles about managing email parameters. In general, you’ll need to: 

1. First, add the personalization token to the corresponding constituent’s record
2. Then, the additional email attribute - personalization tokens - should appear as a merge field for you to include in the body of the email and append to the giving form URL you’re sending out.

Here are some helpful links to the supporting email providers: 

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Personalization Strings in Marketing Cloud
• MyEmma: Adding Personalization Tags to a Mailing, How to use merge tags for personalization
• Constant Contact: Insert Dynamic Links in an Email
• Blackbaud Luminate Online: Personalize Content Based on Custom Fields
• Hubspot: Add Personalization Tokens to a Template or Snippet

As mentioned above, if you choose to re-upload your data in GiveCampus to update the Constituents information (eg: address change or new ask amount), the personalization token itself will not change. Only the data it populates with will change! This means that you won’t need to alter the tokens associated with each constituent record in your email provider. The only exception to this is if you upload multiple tags to the same constituent. In this case, we recommend using the download of already appended tokens on your Giving Form or Campaign for that outreach. 

Personalized Donor Greetings

For Personalization, you can upload a greeting unique to each donor. Note: The message displayed will have a strict character limit of 140 characters. 

Personalized Greetings bring about a great opportunity for schools to thank donors for their sustained support and/or provide segmented language that feels really personal and tailored to each donor.

Any known limitations or risks?

Yes! One risk that is important to be aware of & understand relates to donor privacy. Because end users are not required to log into GiveCampus to see their personalized form, it is important for administrators to not include any personal identifiable information in their greetings. We do not have a way to validate this on our end, so it's up to you to be careful with what you include in each message. 

How does personalization work with reporting? 

When a donor clicks on their unique giving form URL, the donor will see the personalized giving form. Once the donor completes the gift, all fields that you set up to be “passed through” will appear in reporting. Note: we’ll also give donors the option to submit updated information to you. See the next section for more detail!  

The data in the fields that are personalized will be “passed through” to your reports. This will be the PII data (such as address, spouse, full name). This will allow gift processing to easily reconcile those gifts! For data to get “passed through” for a given constituent, the corresponding field (e.g., address) must be a field on the pre-payment form and you must have provided the data for that constituent in the data upload.

Donors will have the option to update the fields that are “passed through” to your reports on the post payment form. This ensures that donors are not slowed down on the form and that the form still delivers an extremely personal experience, while still giving them the ability to update their contact information if needed. See the next section for more information on the post-payment form.

Post-payment form and updating passed-through information 

What happens if a donor wants to submit updated information to your institution? Post-payment form to the rescue! 

There are two ways you can use the post-payment form to give donors the opportunity to update information that you uploaded and passed through to reporting. You can either (1) use the default personalization update fields or you can (2) turn those fields off and create your own post-payment fields.

1. Default personalization update fields: By default, the Personalization feature will add an “update” field to the post-payment form for any corresponding uploaded data field that gets passed through to reporting, with the exception of the external ID, amount, and designation. 
1. Example: If you pass through phone number, street address and zip code, those three fields will appear on the post-payment form with language above that says “Have you recently moved or do you need to update any contact info?” You will see the data for any donors who submit updates in new reporting columns titled update_phone, update_address 1, etc. 
2. Create your own post-payment fields: If there are only particular fields you want to be sure are updated by your donors, you can turn off the personalization update fields and create your own post-payment fields. In that case, you will turn off the personalization updates on a form-by-form basis by going to your admin dashboard and then Giving Forms > form Settings > Forms > Post-Payment Form > Personalization Update Fields > uncheck “Display Update Fields.” Then, head into the form builder for your giving form and add to the post-payment form the fields you want to collect.
1. Example: Let’s say you only care about making sure you have the correct phone number for constituents. In that case, you will turn off the personalization updates, then go into the form builder for your giving form and add phone number as a field to the post-payment form. If you want the updated phone number to replace  in reporting the phone number you originally uploaded, leave the column name as is. However, if you want any updated phone numbers to appear in their own column, change the column name for that field.

Updating Constituent Records

To update a constituent’s record with new biographical information (name, address, etc…) or gift details (designation, amount, etc), there are three ways to do this:

1. Upload a new file:  Upload a new CSV file via the Data Importer. This will update their personalization token with the new information. 

2) Update within Personalization: In Personalization > Data Upload you have the opportunity to update several pieces of information about a constituents token, like their affiliation, greeting message, and designations. Any biographical information like email or address must be updated using the School Level Data Importer. 

FAQ
Does uploading constituent through the Data Importer generate tokens automatically in Personalization? 
Yes, as long as the required columns are present. 

What happens if I upload multiple tags for the same constituent? 
Creating one tag, or multiple, associated with a constituent will generate a different token per tag.