Removing reusable fields from forms versus the school catalog

Removing a custom field from a campaign giving form does not delete answers already recorded on gifts while that field was active. Those gifts retain the data, and the recorded values continue to populate that field in reporting. You do not need to add the question back to the form to recover those earlier answers.

Find previously collected custom-field answers

1. Open Online Giving → Reporting → Custom Reports and create or edit a custom gift report.
2. In Columns, include the relevant custom field using its report-column name, along with gift identifiers and other details needed to identify the gifts. The report-column name may differ from the question's visible label. A Gift Row layout is useful when reviewing responses by gift.
3. Open Online Giving → Reporting → Donations. Select dates covering the gifts collected while the field was active and the appropriate campaign/form scope.
4. Under Select your Report, choose the custom report, then select Download Report. Review the custom-field column for the earlier gifts.

Use a custom online donation report for these answers. The campaign All Gifts Report has a fixed column list and does not automatically include arbitrary custom-field responses.

If the column is missing or an expected answer is blank, check the selected report column, campaign and date range. Gifts submitted after the field was removed will not collect new answers to that question. A gift submitted while an optional field was active may also have no response. Contact Support with the campaign, field/report-column name and example gift IDs if previously collected values are still missing.

Removing a field versus deleting its definition

Removing a field from a form is different from deleting its school-level catalog definition or explicitly changing stored gift data. Bulk removal of a reusable field from selected forms preserves a school-level field when removing the last form instances. Check dependencies and integration mappings before retiring a reusable field; removing it from forms does not remove an external connector field.