FAQs about the BBIS Advanced Donation Form
Published
Author's Note: When approaching the task of writing a blog post about donation trends with BBIS and the Advanced Donation Form, my first step was to reach out to customers and Blackbaud Support and Services staff to learn more about how the Advanced Donation Form was being used. While fully intending to write about trends in this post, I found that there was a lot of questions and confusion around the Advanced Donation Form. So - look for an upcoming blog post about trends, and for now, let's learn more about the Advanced Donation Form and answer the most commonly asked questions!
Taking donations online is a requirement for any non-profit, large and small. Within Blackbaud Internet Solutions (BBIS), we have two ways to take online donations – the “Donation Form” part and the “Advanced Donation Form” (ADF) part. While the Donation Form part has been around for many years, the Advanced Donation Form was originally released in CRM v2.94 in response to customer feedback about design flexibility. As more organizations are upgrading to or implementing on newer versions and have this form offered for the first time, we wanted to dispel some facts – and myths – of the Advanced Donation Form. Below are our most frequently asked questions about the ADF!
FAQ #1: What's the difference between an ADF and a standard Donation Form?
Both the Donation Form and Advanced Donation Forms share many common donation form features. Both forms allow one-time or recurring donations, allow users to select from giving levels and push online donations down into a CRM Enhanced Revenue Batch.
We received feedback from customers that the existing donation form was too strict in its design. Customers wanted to design their own donation experience. With the standard donation form, in order to reorder fields, change captions or change the design of the form, you had to use javascript or jquery to alter the behavior of the form, and based on discovery feedback, the Advanced Donation Form was created and released.
The Advanced Donation Form was created to be a form for developers. It uses an API, with set endpoints (fields), to capture donation information, donor and payment information and send that to CRM. Whereas the standard donation form has a lot of point and click configuration so it's easy for non-technical staff to setup a donation form, the ADF has very little point and click configuration. Most of the configuration lies in html, css, and js code that is written directly into the part. An ADF is not typically easy or quick to setup, unlike the standard Donation Form. While there are some functional differences between the ADF and the standard donation form, the largest difference lies in flexibility in the overall look and feel of the form, and how the form is created.
FAQ #2: What features aren't available in the ADF?
ADF is meant to offer the most commonly used features. Please refer to the feature comparison below (also in the Parts Guide and Help files) for reference.
FAQ #3: Do I have to be a developer to use the ADF?
While anyone can create an advanced donation form part, we recommend that you leave this to a developer. A solid knowledge of html, javascript and css is required to build out the donation form of your dreams. If you want a customized form design but don’t have developers on staff, Blackbaud Services can design and build a form for you on a time and materials basis.
FAQ #4: What’s the best way for my organization to determine if I need an ADF or can use the Standard Donation Form?
The first step to determining which one will work better for you is figuring out your overall online donation strategy. How do you guide people into your donation forms? How many donation forms do you have, and what are the differences between them?
After you have a good strategy, determine what your form requirements are for each form. Are you only allowing recurring gifts to be entered on a specific form? Do you have one form that handles all giving needs? Compare these requirements to the Feature Comparison Guide above to determine which form works best for you.
If you want to build a unique donation experience with the Advanced Donation Form but it doesn’t handle all of your feature requirements, assess how much of an impact not having that feature would be. For example, if one of your requirements is to capture Spouse Name information, how many of your donors input this information on your current form? If joint gifts/spouse information is put into the comments field, how much extra work does that cause your gift administators? Can you separate out those donors through your site user experience and use a standard donation form for only those instances?
Blackbaud has a long-term goal to bring feature parity to the ADF. Until then, features and functions must be weighted carefully with design aesthetics to determine if using an ADF is right for you.
FAQ #5: How do I go about designing the user interface for my donation form part?
Once you’ve determined that your requirements fit the Advanced Donation Form, it’s time for the fun part – designing the user interface. The only visual requirement of an ADF is that it must use the Blackbaud Secure Payments page to capture billing information, as the last step of your form. The best way to design your form is first to look at your competitors and other organizations like you, and then build out a wireframe that lays out the functions of the form. By getting internal signoff on the wireframe first, you will lessen the amount of coding changes that need to be made once you build the form.
FAQ #6: Is the ADF responsive?
Because the design and markup of the form is completely up to you, it is up to your developers to code the ADF to be responsive. BBIS layouts and templates can be made responsive, and by adding a responsively-built ADF form, your donation form would then be considered responsive.
FAQ #7: How do I get my designations into my ADF? What if I want to show a designation hierarchy?
Designations are added within the code by referencing their GUID. You can also pull a collection or group of GUIDs by creating a query resulting in the designations you desire, and adding the query GUID into the ADF to pull your designations. The GUID can be obtained via SQL (if you have access to SQL) or by creating a query with your designations as the query result,and including the Systems Record ID field in your query output.
To include multiple designations, create a query with your designation filter criteria (tip: many customers use tags or attributes to mark their designations for online use, and then query off of that criteria.) Use the query GUID instead of the designation GUID to pull in the designations from your query results.
Designation hierarchies (otherwise known as cascading fund dropdowns) must be created with custom code and javascript.
FAQ #8: How do I get support for the ADF I'm building? Can I just call the regular Support line?
Because of the custom code each customer can build into the Advanced Donation Form, the Advanced Donation Form is considered a customization. While our main Support analysts can answer high-level questions about the Advanced Donation Form, they cannot help you code it, or troubleshoot your custom code. Our Customization Support team can help you with your technical questions about the Advanced Donation Form. Alternatively, our Services team can offer consulting and build support for an additional cost. You can also use the discussion forums on the Blackbaud Developer Network to ask your peers.
FAQ #9: If I send an email from BBIS or CRM Marketing Efforts, is my finder number and other email information still captured?
Just like the standard donation form, donations made through ADF will pass finder number and other email identifiers to CRM revenue records when they initiate their ADF donation through a email sent from CRM (finder number + referring email information) and BBIS (referring email information.)
FAQ #10: Why isn't there any sample code to help me make this work?
In order to be able to update sample code more proactively than product releases allow, sample code for the Advanced Donation Form lives on the BBIS Developer Network. We encourage customer developers to also share their own code with their peers through the Github repository on the site!
Bonus Question: FAQ #11: Do you have clients live using the Advanced Donation Form?
We have more customers going live using the BBIS ADF every month! Check out a few of them below:
Indiana University
University of Georgia
University of California San Diego
Florida State University
The Advanced Donation Form is a distinct departure from other BBIS parts that are largely configuration based and targeted towards less technical users. We would welcome any feedback, other questions you may have about the Advanced Donation Form or this API approach in the comments section below!
For more resources on the Advanced Donation Form:
BBIS Developer Network
Ask Questions at Blackbaud Developer Network
Parts Guide
Samantha McGuin
Sr. Product Manager, BBIS
Taking donations online is a requirement for any non-profit, large and small. Within Blackbaud Internet Solutions (BBIS), we have two ways to take online donations – the “Donation Form” part and the “Advanced Donation Form” (ADF) part. While the Donation Form part has been around for many years, the Advanced Donation Form was originally released in CRM v2.94 in response to customer feedback about design flexibility. As more organizations are upgrading to or implementing on newer versions and have this form offered for the first time, we wanted to dispel some facts – and myths – of the Advanced Donation Form. Below are our most frequently asked questions about the ADF!
FAQ #1: What's the difference between an ADF and a standard Donation Form?
Both the Donation Form and Advanced Donation Forms share many common donation form features. Both forms allow one-time or recurring donations, allow users to select from giving levels and push online donations down into a CRM Enhanced Revenue Batch.
We received feedback from customers that the existing donation form was too strict in its design. Customers wanted to design their own donation experience. With the standard donation form, in order to reorder fields, change captions or change the design of the form, you had to use javascript or jquery to alter the behavior of the form, and based on discovery feedback, the Advanced Donation Form was created and released.
The Advanced Donation Form was created to be a form for developers. It uses an API, with set endpoints (fields), to capture donation information, donor and payment information and send that to CRM. Whereas the standard donation form has a lot of point and click configuration so it's easy for non-technical staff to setup a donation form, the ADF has very little point and click configuration. Most of the configuration lies in html, css, and js code that is written directly into the part. An ADF is not typically easy or quick to setup, unlike the standard Donation Form. While there are some functional differences between the ADF and the standard donation form, the largest difference lies in flexibility in the overall look and feel of the form, and how the form is created.
FAQ #2: What features aren't available in the ADF?
ADF is meant to offer the most commonly used features. Please refer to the feature comparison below (also in the Parts Guide and Help files) for reference.
| Feature | Advanced Donation Form | Standard Donation Form |
| Appeals | Yes | Yes |
| Anonymous gift | Yes | Yes |
| Corporate gift | Yes | Yes |
| Finder number | Yes | Yes |
| Gift comments | Yes | Yes |
| Recurring gifts | Yes | Yes |
| Revenue attributes | Yes | Yes |
| One-time gifts | Yes | Yes |
| Payment 2.0 support | Yes | Yes |
| Pledge (Bill me later) | Yes | Yes |
| QAS | Yes | Yes |
| Tribute | Yes | Yes |
| Designation search | Yes, but you must use javascript in the part | Yes |
| Direct debit | Yes, but you must integrate the part with a Payment 2.0 part | Yes |
| Donor challenge | No | Yes |
| eCards | No | Yes |
| eReceipts | No | Yes |
| Email notifications to internal staff | No | Yes |
| Impact statement | No | Yes |
| Matching gift | No | Yes |
| Name format field entry | No | Yes |
| Spouse informaiton and joint gifts | No | Yes |
| reCAPTCHA | No | Yes |
| Marketing source code | Yes | No |
FAQ #3: Do I have to be a developer to use the ADF?
While anyone can create an advanced donation form part, we recommend that you leave this to a developer. A solid knowledge of html, javascript and css is required to build out the donation form of your dreams. If you want a customized form design but don’t have developers on staff, Blackbaud Services can design and build a form for you on a time and materials basis.
FAQ #4: What’s the best way for my organization to determine if I need an ADF or can use the Standard Donation Form?
The first step to determining which one will work better for you is figuring out your overall online donation strategy. How do you guide people into your donation forms? How many donation forms do you have, and what are the differences between them?
After you have a good strategy, determine what your form requirements are for each form. Are you only allowing recurring gifts to be entered on a specific form? Do you have one form that handles all giving needs? Compare these requirements to the Feature Comparison Guide above to determine which form works best for you.
If you want to build a unique donation experience with the Advanced Donation Form but it doesn’t handle all of your feature requirements, assess how much of an impact not having that feature would be. For example, if one of your requirements is to capture Spouse Name information, how many of your donors input this information on your current form? If joint gifts/spouse information is put into the comments field, how much extra work does that cause your gift administators? Can you separate out those donors through your site user experience and use a standard donation form for only those instances?
Blackbaud has a long-term goal to bring feature parity to the ADF. Until then, features and functions must be weighted carefully with design aesthetics to determine if using an ADF is right for you.
FAQ #5: How do I go about designing the user interface for my donation form part?
Once you’ve determined that your requirements fit the Advanced Donation Form, it’s time for the fun part – designing the user interface. The only visual requirement of an ADF is that it must use the Blackbaud Secure Payments page to capture billing information, as the last step of your form. The best way to design your form is first to look at your competitors and other organizations like you, and then build out a wireframe that lays out the functions of the form. By getting internal signoff on the wireframe first, you will lessen the amount of coding changes that need to be made once you build the form.
FAQ #6: Is the ADF responsive?
Because the design and markup of the form is completely up to you, it is up to your developers to code the ADF to be responsive. BBIS layouts and templates can be made responsive, and by adding a responsively-built ADF form, your donation form would then be considered responsive.
FAQ #7: How do I get my designations into my ADF? What if I want to show a designation hierarchy?
Designations are added within the code by referencing their GUID. You can also pull a collection or group of GUIDs by creating a query resulting in the designations you desire, and adding the query GUID into the ADF to pull your designations. The GUID can be obtained via SQL (if you have access to SQL) or by creating a query with your designations as the query result,and including the Systems Record ID field in your query output.
To include multiple designations, create a query with your designation filter criteria (tip: many customers use tags or attributes to mark their designations for online use, and then query off of that criteria.) Use the query GUID instead of the designation GUID to pull in the designations from your query results.
Designation hierarchies (otherwise known as cascading fund dropdowns) must be created with custom code and javascript.
FAQ #8: How do I get support for the ADF I'm building? Can I just call the regular Support line?
Because of the custom code each customer can build into the Advanced Donation Form, the Advanced Donation Form is considered a customization. While our main Support analysts can answer high-level questions about the Advanced Donation Form, they cannot help you code it, or troubleshoot your custom code. Our Customization Support team can help you with your technical questions about the Advanced Donation Form. Alternatively, our Services team can offer consulting and build support for an additional cost. You can also use the discussion forums on the Blackbaud Developer Network to ask your peers.
FAQ #9: If I send an email from BBIS or CRM Marketing Efforts, is my finder number and other email information still captured?
Just like the standard donation form, donations made through ADF will pass finder number and other email identifiers to CRM revenue records when they initiate their ADF donation through a email sent from CRM (finder number + referring email information) and BBIS (referring email information.)
FAQ #10: Why isn't there any sample code to help me make this work?
In order to be able to update sample code more proactively than product releases allow, sample code for the Advanced Donation Form lives on the BBIS Developer Network. We encourage customer developers to also share their own code with their peers through the Github repository on the site!
Bonus Question: FAQ #11: Do you have clients live using the Advanced Donation Form?
We have more customers going live using the BBIS ADF every month! Check out a few of them below:
Indiana University
University of Georgia
University of California San Diego
Florida State University
The Advanced Donation Form is a distinct departure from other BBIS parts that are largely configuration based and targeted towards less technical users. We would welcome any feedback, other questions you may have about the Advanced Donation Form or this API approach in the comments section below!
For more resources on the Advanced Donation Form:
BBIS Developer Network
Ask Questions at Blackbaud Developer Network
Parts Guide
Samantha McGuin
Sr. Product Manager, BBIS
News
Blackbaud CRM™ and Blackbaud Internet Solutions™ Blog
07/14/2015 8:50pm EDT
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