Best Practice for How to Easily Find Donations from DIY Forms 2662

Best Practice for How to Easily Find Donations from DIY Forms

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Hello eTap Users!

eTapestry's Onboarding and Adoptions Program Manager Geoff Arbuckle here with a tip for anyone who is building an online DIY giving form.  While this does get covered and mentioned in our "Creating Forms in eTapestry" Customer Success Webinar, I wanted to also post something here on the Community in the event that you have a question concerning this or needed a refersher.

When setting up your Do-It-Yourself Transaction forms (regardless if it is a general donation form, membership form, or an event registration form), we strongly recommend you also set up an Approach inside eTapestry to connect to the form you are building.  The reason behind this suggestion is actually fairly simple.  When you receive donations from a DIY Form, what you are shown in the journal entry is information like the Received Amount, the Date, the Fund (required on all tranasctions), and any User Defined Fields that were either set up as "Hidden Fields" or as fields that can be selected by the donor. 

There is not a place on the gift that shows which page that donation was submitted.  This can definitely cause some reporting headaches.  So let's look at our suggestion for what to do to help make this a little clearer when trying to find donations from a particular DIY Form:

To best record information to show if it came from the 2016 Gala Event or from the Online Donation Form or from the Membership Page, definitely set up an Approach by clicking Management and clicking Approaches under "Donation Strategies".  Set up Approaches for each of your pages so they can be automatically filled in when your donors submit a gift.  Also, be sure that whenever you update existing forms to apply to a new fundraising purpose or the following year's event, make sure to add the Approaches and switch them out in your settings so the new gifts for that new event/purpose are not being marked with the old Approaches.

For more information, feel free to contact Support and I hope to see you at one of our next Customer Success Webinars!

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