Custom Field Response in Donation Form

Dylan Reid

We just launched our first standard form on our website this week. When designing the form, I created a required custom field option on the form that tells us if the individual donating would like their acknowledgment letter sent via email or USPS. The field works, and it adds the acknowledgment preference to the constituent's profile, but I am not seeing the results of the entry on the BB donation notification email I receive. This would mean that I would have to go into the record of every single donor and check their acknowledgment pref under custom fields for every gift received.

Am I missing a better way to capture this info or a way to get the custom field result to send on the email notification on our side? Currently it does list the custom field in the email to the donor.

Christine Robertson

@Dylan Reid Rather than open all of the records, have you tried building one list/query for the records that have the email option selected and another for the ones who prefer USPS? Then you can send the appropriate acknowledgement from there.

Dylan Reid

@Christine Robertson That's a good thought. It still would take a bit of manual matching up, but I will try that out to see if it would work for our process flow.

It seems silly to me that the gift details get sent on the outgoing email to donors, but not internally to us. I guess Blackbaud expects that we can see the record of the gift, so it's not needed. ?‍♂️

Miki Martin

@Dylan Reid I had a similar process at my former org to what @Christine Robertson suggested. I would acknowledge the email recipients first through the web view process and then when I ran the donation acknowledgement process in database view the donors that received an email would already be marked as acknowledged and therefore not be pulled for the mail portion. Being a smaller high school we did not have a lot of daily donations so it was not too much and all these donors had mailed in remits so I had them sorted on my desk. Having them done electronically definitely throws in a kink but I think the separate queries should help.

Christine Robertson

@Dylan Reid Do you have the giving form set to send you the email notification when the gift is made? Would that help in any way?

I was thinking that the List(s) would be useful for actually sending the two different notifications. I would use the email one to send the emails and the non-email one to generate the direct mail piece.