A No-Brainer

Working with eTapestry over the years, I’ve learned to use and appreciate a lot of the features eTapestry offers. Some are obvious—some take time to discover.

Queries, reports, and integrated communications are all pretty nifty, but in terms of ease of use and bang for your buck (think ROI), nothing beats do-it-yourself (DIY) forms.

Let’s suppose you acquire a brand new eTapestry database and you do nothing with it (not very realistic but hear me out). You do, however, spend a few minutes setting up a DIY online giving page. The minute you make the page live, that giving page can start collecting donations, which then automatically download into your eTapestry database. Whether ten, ten thousand, or ten million donations, all those donations are automatically captured along with the donor information. And you did nothing in eTapestry other than set up that online page. How is that for awesome? 



Sure, DIY forms do have some limitations but that’s actually the whole point (and beauty) of them. DIY forms are designed to be easy and quick to deploy by any regular Joe or Jane, while still providing excellent functionality and benefits.
Here are some of my favorite features:

• You don’t need to apply any styling to your online pages. With an embeddable template, your DIY pages can inherit the look and feel of your website.
• Thank donors and prospects for their online submissions using both a customized page and a follow-up email.
• Automatically track each online submission with user defined fields.
• Encourage recurring gifts.

I’m curious … is your organization taking advantage of DIY forms? How are you using them? Would you like to share that input here in the eTapestry Community?

For those of you new to eTapestry or to DIY forms, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to our newest free online training course eTapestry: Basics of Do-It-Yourself Forms. Thirty minutes of your time is all it takes to get up and running with DIY forms. This one is a no-brainer!