Standard Donation Forms or Optimized Donation Forms and why?

@Lee Grisham
I could see an organization using both regular and optimized forms. From a data standpoint, yes – it's worrying not to be able to require contact info beyond an email. If a donor hasn't previously had an email in RE, then how do we match existing donors? What if a donor has moved?

And yet, from a donor conversion stance, that's precisely why optimized forms are beneficial. By asking the gift info first and only requiring email, it creates less steps for a donor to “turn away”. There's a ton of best practice articles out there about how the less fields a donor has to fill in, the more likely they are to follow through with a gift.

In my mind, you might use both kinds of forms. You'd have your standard donation form on your main “donate” page, where a donor could select designation, tribute, and custom fields. The optimized forms will shine best on your “push pages”, ie landing pages for email marketing campaigns. These donors already have an email address in your system, they've responded to a call to action and their impulse gift is intended for one specific designation.

The only reason we don't begin using them right now is that we're waiting until recurring gifts are improved more in NXT. We don't want recurring gifts coming in as NXT-only processing until all the bugs are worked out.