Hack your URLs with newly added attributes

Published

When promoting your peer-to-peer campaigns on social media, do you ever wish you could ask people to “Give $10 today” and then have the donation form pre-populate that exact gift amount while your reports track how many came through your social channel? Or perhaps you are specifically asking people to create a personal page and instead of sending them to your campaign page and hoping they click the right button, you want them to “jump” ahead in the process and land directly on personal page creation. Or maybe you want to add a button to your website that will send users to DIY fundraising that is not tied to a campaign but is associated with your organization. Well stay tuned because we have the customization for you!

With Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising™, powered by JustGiving™ we offer handy hacks for users to leverage in order to customize supporter experiences. Today, we will focus on the ability to alter URL strings to help direct certain audiences to specific results so you can make sure you are providing the most relevant content based on your calls to action and overall strategy. These tailored links are affectionally known as “Simple Donation Integration” (just rolls off the tongue, right?) and are used to connect your calls to action (like give $10) into the donation user journey, simply. These modifications can be applied to personal fundraising pages, campaign pages, and charity profile pages.

Available Attributes:

Amount
Charity direct, campaign or fundraising page
Currency
Reference

ExitURL and many others

How it works:

First, start with our core link structure: https://link.justgiving.com. After, there are various words, numbers, and characters that drive the visitor to the correct location. Think of these link types like a mailing address with https://link.justgiving.com being the state. Various parameters act as the house number, street name and city to more specifically direct the page visitor to the proper location.

For example: https://link.justgiving.com/v1/charity/donate/charityId/2050?Amount=100&currency=USD&reference=jamiedemo&exitURL=www.mywebsite.com

The fields in green are parameters you can modify to manipulate the link. This URL sends the viewer to a specific nonprofit’s donation form (via the charity ID parameter) with $100 prefilled (via the amount and currency) and once the transaction is completed, the page will redirect the donor to the organization’s website (via exit URL). The Reference here (JamieDemo) can be what is most relevant for you as a source code (like if you were sending this link via your January Newsletter, you could have a reference of “JanEnews”). You can leverage the column labeled Third Party Reference in your JustGiving Reports to track the effectiveness of these sources.

How to create your own link:

Learn more about creating the links and the eligible pages here. For now, you can combine variations of the below (to the core structure mentioned above) by adding a single ? and then separating each following parameter with &

Name	Description	Supports Fundraising & Direct donations	Query String Parameter	Notes
CharityId	The unique id of the charity on JustGiving. Find your ID here.	Both	charityid=	Not to be confused with the charity's registration number.
Amount	A decimal number (optionally including two decimal places.) to pre-fill the donation amount.	Both	amount=	See list of minimum amounts supported
DonationValue NEW!	A decimal number (optionally including two decimal places.) to pre-set the donation value and bypass the amount step.	Both	donationValue=	See list of minimum amounts supported
Reference	50 characters of free text for your reference. This is returned on the JustGiving API as "thirdPartyReference" and returned in charity donation reports.	Both	reference=	50 character limit
Frequency NEW!	If true, the user will land on the donation amount page with monthly/recurring selected.	Direct donations only	isRecurring=	If left empty or false, we default to one time donation
ExitUrl	Once payment processing is complete, redirects user to the specified web address instead of default JustGiving Thank You page.	Both	exiturl=	A Url encoded Uri. If an exitUrl is supplied, after the "Processing" page, the user is redirected to this location. We suggest that you encode some kind of unique identifier into this exitUrl so you can identify the user.
Forced Guest Checkout NEW!	If true, for a logged out user, they will not given the opportunity to log in.	Both	forceGuest=	If left empty or false, we will default to presenting log in
Successful DonationID	Where the donation is complete, we'll return to you the successful donationId	Both	JUSTGIVING-DONATION-ID	Can be appended to exitUrl

Pro Tip: If the link takes you to https://www.justgiving.com/discover/featured then the page you're trying to donate to is likely to be expired, misconfigured or non-existent. You can use our test credit card to make sure the process works!

Need some inspiration for when to optimize your visitor experience with SDI links?

Create your own QR Code that routes fans to your pages

Redirect a donor to your main website with the exitUrl parameter
Drive last minute sign ups from specific channels and track the success rate
Override your campaign page by dropping the viewer directly into the personal page creation or donation flow
Create personalize links for your advocates to share with their networks via gaming platforms, social media, or email

For detailed instructions or to learn more about these link types, check out our Developer’s Resources.

News JustGiving® from Blackbaud® Blog 02/10/2021 9:00am EST

Added by Stephanie Thomas

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