Donation form url parameters

Mary Beauclair · June 27

Hi Everyone,

We recently started using NXT donation forms with BBMS and I have a question for you about how to use the optional URL parameters to specify appeal/fund/campaign. I would like to be able to replicate what we were doing before switching to forms in NXT and BBMS, but I don't understand if it's actually possible. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Previously we had one donation form that we used for basically all of our appeals for a given fund. Donors would select the appeal on the form - this is a response to the Fall Mailing/Christmas Mailing/Spring Mailing - we would change which options were available depending on which appeals we currently had running for that specific fund. We also always had an “other” option for new donors who would not have received any of our appeal mailers but whose gift was still going to that specific fund.

So, I understand that using the URL parameters we could automatically assign an appeal without the donor needing to select anything, but it seems like it is only possible to have one appeal option at a given time. If we embed the form on our website we could not run multiple appeals at the same time on the same form. Is that correct?

Basically I need a way to not have a separate form for every appeal that goes to a given fund. Reading some of the documentation/discssion about the URL parameters it sounds like this might be possible, but I'm having difficulty understanding how to actually do this. I want all donors to be able to go to the same form, but I want to be able to know which appeal they are responding to.

Any insight is most welcome. Thank you in advance!

Samantha McGuin · June 27

@Mary Beauclair Hi Mary. Any appeal that you pass in via the URL will override the appeal that you set on the form itself. So you can still have a “default appeal” that you configure when you create/edit the form, but if an appeal is part of the URL, that URL appeal will be written to the gift record.

Hope this helps!

Mary Beauclair · June 30

@Samantha McGuin
I see how this could work for emailed appeals where you can display whatever text you want and have a link to the URL with parameters for the specific appeal (we could display “ourwebsite/give” and have the linked URL also include the parameters but the donor would not see this), but this does not seem to work for printed appeal materials. As I understand it, if donors want to give online in response to something they received in the mail, not email, in order to distinguish the appeals we would have to include the parameters in the URL. They could not all be directed to give online by visiting “ourwebsite/give”, we would have to tell them to go to “ourwebsite/give?appealid=1234” and they would have to actually type in the parameters.

Is this correct? If so, is there another way to distinguish appeal response?

Samantha McGuin · June 30

@Mary Beauclair yes - the donor would need to either click on a link that included the passthrough parameter. For print materials I would recommend you use a URL shortener (commercially available like bit.ly or TinyURL) to shorten the URL so its simpler for your donors to type in.

The other option is to create a new form for your appeal, set the appeal as the default on the form and then link your donors directly to that specific form. Then you won't have to worry about the appeal passthrough.

Samantha McGuin · June 30

@Mary Beauclair One last thought - you could also setup a custom field/attribute to have a “how did you hear about us” question for your donors on your form that was either setup for text or a table of values for them to choose from. This could give you enough info to be able to alter the appeal in the gift batch to the right one - a little more labor intensive for your admins, but wanted to throw it out as a possibility.