DP Forms 101 – Canada

Hello and welcome to our pre recorded webinar about DP Forms 101. Also known as the drag and drop form builder. As of August 2024 this product is now available in Canada. We’re going to talk about some of the unique features of DP forms for our Canadian clients today, anybody from the Read More

Hello and welcome to our pre recorded webinar about DP Forms 101. Also known as the drag and drop form builder. As of August 2024 this product is now available in Canada. We’re going to talk about some of the unique features of DP forms for our Canadian clients today, anybody from the US, I’ll direct you to the other webinar specifically for the US.

Really, the big difference comes down to payment processing. What options do we all have for payment processing as of the date of this recording, September 16, 2024 in Canada, we don’t have ACH bank account transfers as an option just yet, just your classic credit card options, as well as PayPal and Venmo. Something else that we’ve considered for DP Forms in Canada is the receding process, which is going to be significantly streamlined with this new product.

Hello. My name is Sean Potero. I am a training specialist here at DonorPerfect. I often working one on one with clients. Every now and then, I get to do these fun, pre-recorded webinars where this has been a long time coming. This has been available in the US for a while, but we finally have it available in Canada. I’ll be going to be going through the whole process here. I’m going to create a form from scratch, and if plenty of time to do that, I can do that very, very quickly. The classic forms have a little bit more versatility or established product. They’re capable of doing events and peer to peer fundraising and non monetary forms for sign ups and surveys. But with our new forms, the DP Forms, they’re a lot easier to work with. They just take donations one time or recurring, you have your usual gamut of credit cards that you can select from, as well as PayPal and Venmo. If you have a business paypal account, probably make one of these in about 10 minutes. They are pretty easy to use when it comes to designing. We’ll see we can drag and drop different elements. If we can see it, we can move it, and we can also brand it fairly easily with our colors and images. There is a higher number of image formats that we allow for the these new forms.

They’re also effective after our decades in the nonprofit industry creating forums like this, we’ve put some thought into some of the limitations and uses for these forums when It comes to human psychology and how people donate so Again, reach out to the Support Department. If you are not doing payment processing with us. Reach out to the payment processing team, they’ll work on getting you set up. The average transaction fee is roughly 3% we’ll see very soon. It is very easy to create drag and drop. If you can see it, you can move it much more friendly to branding, getting your colors and your images on there. We’ve also seen that it works very well being embedded in iframe so you can get it onto your website very easily based off feedback that we’ve gotten. The new forms also have the ability to donate as an organization, and have that slight difference in data for organizations be reflected in DonorPerfect new forms, just like classic forms have tributes. The big difference is that classic forms would kind of just guide you in the process of a physical letter to notify somebody, which is not the case with the new one. The if you want to notify somebody about a tribute donation that happens automatically, say, after my grandmother passed people donate and her memory, they want to notify me about it right from the new DP Forms, it’ll send me an email notifying me that people have made donations in her memory. Classic forms had that, but it would have been a manual letter process.

All right, let’s dive on in, in my fake database here. I do know that this system that I’m in right now, just like all of the DonorPerfect databases, when we are looking at people, which I will do at a certain point, my screens are set up a little bit differently from yours. I will go to the app screen where I have my online forms, and I have the side menu, and I’m going to go to drag and drop form builder. Here we can see the existing online forums that are here, if you’re used to online forms classic you know that the classic version had a column for pending where gifts would need to be downloaded into DonorPerfect. That’s not even a setting here, all these 21 gifts totaling this amount, have just been downloaded into DonorPerfect, automatically and with these different forms, I could click on their names to edit them, but I’ll show you how easy it is to create a new one. Let’s go with create a new form, and I think I’m going to make this a Giving Tuesday form. Let’s give it a name. Never too early to create this, have it ready to go and outside of the name at this stage, really, the options are, do we want the donation buttons to have amounts, or do we want them to have a mount and an impact statement? $25 covers 10 meals at your homeless shelter, that type of thing. If you’re able to come up with a honest and accurate calculation for how this money will impact your community, you certainly can put that on the donation amounts, but we could always go back and add that option later on. I’ll keep it simple. But. Just the donation amounts from here, and then click on Create Form. If this is the very first time that you’ve done this, you’ll have a pop up at this step that’ll walk you through how to build and edit this form. All my options are broken down into categories on the left hand side. Right now, we’re in the build option. In the build sub menu, we have all of the different elements that are already featured in the form. We have our image right up top. I can click on Browse and grab an image of my choice from my file explorer.

We also have a headline, where we can have a title or a call to action, and then we have text where I could put in our mission statement, our objective, our goals. We have a higher character limit here in this text section, if we wanted to use it, I could always get rid of it by clicking on the trash can, and then I could always bring it back just as easily from build. I could click and drag text back over, drop it where I want it to go, and then use this editor to format the text. We could even insert links or add emojis if you wanted to, and you can have multiple images if you wanted. Again, just click and drag from build, and you’ll have that option in here. I could even click and drag two other elements. We will circle back to the payment option that is right here. But we also have the tributes. I would advise against doing this. Many people, depending on the nature of your organization, would probably like to donate in memory or in honor of somebody within your community. If that’s not the case, you could always remove it and again, just from build drag and drop it back over. Same thing goes for the donors offset fees option, which we’ll see towards the bottom, since the processing gateway does have a on average, 3% processing fee the Help, help us cover cost option here at the bottom will help mitigate that transaction cost, both of which you could choose to exclude if you wanted to. For our donation item, I could either click on payments or just click on it, and on the left hand side, it’ll pop open with some additional options for editing it. I do have monthly and one time, but I actually have different amounts. For one time or monthly, people are more likely to donate a little bit more, if it’s only a one time donation. Right now, these are just the default amounts that we start with. I can certainly change these amounts if I want to, or add to it you want to have a higher amount. And we can check these boxes to change what the default is going to be. And now I have five different donation amounts here, and the option to add a another amount is grayed out. A lot of studies show that when there are more than five donation amounts, people get analysis paralysis. Can’t make a decision there are less likely to complete this form in the opposite direction if you have, say, less than three, if you had only two donation amounts, people feel stuck and forced between that binary option again, are less likely to complete the form. The sweet spot is between three and five, and those are the donation amounts that will allow you to have on the new DP Forms. I can’t toggle between what the monthly or one time amounts are going to be. Same limitations here for the amounts that we can have, as long as it’s over $5.

If I go down in payments to amount settings, we can change the header I want to give, I want to donate, I want to provide. Here is where we could lock the form in to get. Just be one time, or just be monthly. It’ll have both on it for your very first one. When you open it up, you can also have it default to monthly giving. And here is where we could enable those impact statements. If you wanted to have them, I’ll leave those on and I’ll go back. And now that the impact statements are on there, it has changed the amount editing slightly for the different donation amounts.

In addition to an amount, you have a box where you could put some of that example text so and as I’ve been going along, all of this has been auto saving, and not true of the classic forms. Classic forms had to be manually saved occasionally. But as I’m going through here, there’s no save button. It will just automatically put that on there.

And we could always disable these. It will remember what your impact statement was previously so it’s not deleting that text. You can just decide whether or not you want it to display. Okay, building these, essentially it goes top to bottom on the left hand side, onward and forward. We can go to style right now the background is gray. I can click on this icon where I could use the color wheel as always if I wanted to pick a certain color. I could also go down here use RGB HSL or my hex code, or we can click on this eyedropper where it turns our mouse into a magnifying glass, and we can select a pixel with the color of our choice, and we can do that for the accent color as well.

And before I move on to the next section, I want to take this back into DonorPerfect, the database, and let’s look up one of our donors here. And let’s look at the gift screen for one of these donations, and let’s edit it. Now, when Sarah went to that online form as a donor, she picked the amount she wanted to donate. Looks like $103 so likely rounded up to 3% the date of gift was the day of the transaction. She chose that as well. But we have all this other detail on the gift that we have to be concerned with. What is the general ledger? What is the fund that this money is going into is this a part of a particular fundraising effort? If so, what is the solicitation code for it? Are you using QuickBooks class? Do you have sub solicitations for all of our Canadian clients? There are also four fields for data entry that are very important that we have to consider, typically, with the classic forms we did for manual data entry, we have to consider, are we going to acknowledge and receipt this? If so, are we going to do email letter? Is this going to be thanked individually. Will we send a receipt for this, or will it be consolidated? Or what thank you letter are we getting now, these values, these receipt values, in these four fields, are essentially going to take care of themselves. You will get to decide the thank you receipt that is going to be used in the process, but it will already be marked as email individual acknowledge receipt for everything else that you want to account for on the gift screen, you can select that and hidden fields. Sarah picks the date. Sarah picks the amount. But when I go into hidden fields, what about the rest of these gift codes? I’ll go to assign a code for solicitation. I’m. And we do have one specifically for giving Tuesday 2024 we can select a campaign if you’re using this field as well. Let us maybe add another field, QuickBooks class. Not everybody is using this if you’re using the QuickBooks integration, but if you are, we can lock that value in as well. And we have general ledger here is all the money that is going to be coming through this form, going into the same income account. If so, general ledger is already a hidden field, and I can select, say, our general fund that this money is going to be going into, and this will ensure that when these transactions turn into gifts for reporting purposes and data integrity, they are going to have the options on it that you select type of gift will fill itself out depending on what their payment option is.

General Fund was selected here for the general ledger. I could also delete this. I could delete general ledger. If I go back to build, I can re add it at the bottom of my build area, we have different types of fields, and if there is a certain gift field from the gift screen specifically that you want to have put onto the DP form, well it has to not be one of the hidden fields. So that’s why I remove General Ledger from a hidden field, and let’s add it as a drop down. That’s what it is. It is a drop down menu. As soon as I drag and release it, it wants to map to a donor, perfect field. We’ll select our field. Let us change the label right now, it’s general ledger. Constituents won’t understand that. Which funds would you like to donate to? We could make this required. We should also consider editing our drop down values that are in there if we are making this field visible, it is likely we won’t want them to be able to pick from everything. There’s a visible column where I can remove the ones I don’t want them to pick from. Let’s keep building fund, general funds. Un we all know this internally is unrestricted, but maybe we could relabel this so it is aware needed most, and DonorPerfect, it’ll still be unrestricted, but we can have a custom display value for this option. There we go, and we can also set a default value, especially since this is required, if they want to ignore this option, where should this money go? Let’s add a let’s add one more field. I think this is a good selection for our hidden fields. If I go back to build maybe we could add a checkbox some people want to donate anonymously, there is an anonymous gift checkbox, which you could certainly add. And what else might we consider a memo box on the gift screen? Gift memo. You might not decide to do all this with your form, but just showing you some of what it’s capable of.

Just putting a memo field here does nothing. I then have to tell it which field, specifically in DonorPerfect, it’s going to be attached to, all right, so we’re almost, we’re almost ready to go. Here we have our hidden fields. We have our amounts. They pick the amounts, they pick the dates. Maybe they pick the general ledger. Hidden fields will be locked in for the gift. What about the thank you that they’re going to get? What about the what about the online email receipt that they’re going to receive upon a successful transaction? I should say that is going to be set up in settings. Underneath settings, we do have the confirmation page. There is a pop up upon a successful. Transaction that you could customize here.

The first option, customized confirmation page, but you should also go through the setup. Thank you, email and receipt. When you select that option, it will give you many different emails to choose from. This list of emails is very specifically found underneath mailings and email templates. You likely have many of these set up already. If you do not, please reach out to the Support Department. They’ll help you create, create one of these emails. We’ll take a look at our standard thank you letter with official receipt. Oh no, here we go. My colleagues have already created one Giving Tuesday. Thank you. Letter with official receipt, different fundraising effort, different language.

We have our message in here, all of our merge fields. If I go over to PDF receipt, we’ll see that it has our receipt number, our receipt date, the amount, and all that other required information. So this will have to be in there already. It likely is for you. If you don’t have one of these email templates set up, reach out to support. They’ll be able to assist you in that process. There we go. And now that all that is done, I’m going to click on Publish it is prompting me to add a contact. This is best practice, just in case somebody wants to reach out for assistance. Who internally should they be talking to? This is going to show up at the bottom of the form. We can put an email address as well.

Then I can click on Publish, and now the form is ready. I can copy the link, go to QR code from here, I could generate that QR code and download it. Use that anywhere I see fit. We can also preview it, see what the user experience is going to look like. And the publish button is now gray. If I make any changes to this, change the amounts, change the images, it will save my changes right away, but it won’t publish them. Clicking this Publish button, which is now relit, is very important, because it will publish the changes that I made. If I don’t click that publish button after making that even minor change of image location, the end result won’t show it. So after you do your work, just make sure that you’re occasionally clicking on the Publish button. And when transactions go through, they will look essentially like this, based off the email you select, they will have the appropriate thank you letter. They will be receipted individually by email acknowledge receipt. All the receipt information will fill out automatically. If they choose a recurring donation. The first pledge payment that goes through will be marked and receded. Subsequent ones will go through as a consolidated pledge for an end of the year. Thank you. 

Uh, most of the work is going to be set up for us already in that apps drop down. Okay, to recap, these new forms provide an easy use donor experience for accepting one time or monthly gifts you are going to have to be doing payment processing through safe safe and you can easily customize them for your branding and messaging. Thank you so much. If you do have any questions, please reach out to the Support Department. This has been DP Forms, 101, for Canada. I’ve been Sean Potero, and you have been a great audience. Take care. Everybody. Have a great day.