Using a CMS other than BBIS

Mike Metcalf

Have any BBCRM customers been using a CMS other than BBIS? How do you do donation forms and integrate back to BBCRM?

Rick Root

@Mike Metcalf You have to have BBIS running to use BBIS donation forms. You MAY be able to build your own donation form in your CMS that calls the advanced donation form APIs though I'm not entirely sure they would accept posted data from a third party domain.

BBIS is a horrible CMS. We have only really used it as a website for our health foundation and they have since moved to our campus WordPress environment.

We basically ONLY use BBIS for online giving, event registrations, and as the back end for our custom alumni directory (written in Angular, using BBIS custom handlers as the interface to the DB)

Mike Metcalf

@Rick Root Thanks for the input. We've been on BBIS since 2011 and as a CMS it is far from meeting our needs. Unfortunately, the donation forms have been some of the biggest challenges and we currently have a terrible donor experience because of it. We have a project underway to find a “modern” CMS/DXP, but processing of donations is still a bit of a mystery. Thanks again.

Michael Kracke

@Mike Metcalf

We have migrated our sites to use WordPress for the bulk of the site and use BBIS for the donation forms. Donors click a give button on our WP site that uses URL Query Parameters that populate the donation form with the specific fund(s).

For the most part it works well. Searching for a fund takes you back to our WP site, but it's easier to find a fund there.

Rick Root

@Mike Metcalf Our upcoming #GiveUNC (Giving Day) utilizes WordPress and this year we've added a bit of a shopping cart functionality to it. Ultimately, the donor will still check out using our BBIS ADF, but the wordpress cart will pass in the designations and amounts.

I'll share when it goes live

Mike Metcalf

@Rick Root, I would love to see what you've created. I'm thinking of pursuing a similar tactic of gathering information in one system and passing the designations, etc along to an ADF. Thanks for sharing.

Rick Root

@Mike Metcalf Sure. The functionality is similar to what you see on our home page of https://give.unc.edu which allows you to browse around and add different items to your shopping cart before going to check out.

I have been using a BBIS custom handler to populate fund lists on giving pages like this:

https://give.unc.edu/hfdonate?p=prom
and https://give.unc.edu/#page_dynamic,prom

I modified the custom handlers to return JSONP for use with the external WordPress site being developed by a third party, so when someone clicks on a link to support the UNC Children's Hospital, they call the custom handler on the BBIS server to load the dropdown list. They handle storing the shopping cart details on their own end… and then when the user is ready to check out, it sends them to a link like this:

https://give.unc.edu/giveunc?f=000001&a=10.00&f=343427&a=25.00

We are NOT collecting donor/contact information on the wordpress side so basically it just ends up on our BBIS ADF with the funds and amounts pre-selected

We have also done an integration with Community Funded that works a little differently - basically their system posts to an endpoint I created, and we return a token…. then Community Funded redirects the donor to our payment page with the token, and ALL of the information is pre-filled on the form and we go straight to the checkout preview step.

Michael Kracke

@Rick Root I did something very similar. I wrote a custom WP plugin that sync our funds from BBCRM nightly and creates them as a custom post type. Then in BBIS, we actually call the WP API because its so much faster to populate the funds.

So in WP the pages look like this: https://nufoundation.org/fund/01054960/ and then a button takes you to BBIS https://secure.nufoundation.org/give?fundid=01054960&sitename=University%20of%20Nebraska where you can get funds by ID(s) and/or by sitename. The default donation form page populates a list that is customizable based on a Designation Attribute

Mike Metcalf

@Michael Kracke and @Rick Root. Thank you for the replies and links to examples. you have done exceptional work making the process of supporting your respective organizations a positive experience. Have either of you experimented with using the SKY API to interface with BBCRM?