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Online Giving Form Building Resources

Online Giving Form Build Order

Map out Form before build: i.e. diagram, whiteboard, etc

  1. Build Designations

  2. Build Collections

  3. Build the Form and enable a collection

  4. Steps

  5. Categories

  6. Fields

    1. Existing Fields

    2. New Fields

    3. Reusable Instance Fields

  7. Roles (if needed)

  8. Customize URL's (if needed)

  9. Add Appeal Codes

  10. Custom Design

  11. Admin Test

  12. User Test

  13. Launch

Documentation:Giving Form Build | Giving Form Build Checklist

Forms Vocabulary

General Forms

Steps: Page display in the form. You can create additional steps to break up information collection flow.

Categories: The containers the hold and sort your data fields. Categories can be used as filters in reporting and can collapse fields from view in a form.

Fields: The tool used to collect the data for storage in your database

Existing Fields: Fields that have been created in your database or mapped over from your back end database (example: profile member fields)

New Fields: A new field that is created because it does not exist in your database. DO NOT create new fields when an existing field is present. (example: phone number field is existing because it is a member field used often, whereas a field requesting someone’s favorite color would be unique and specific to the form it lives in. This would be a new field.)

Giving Forms

Donations: The giving form is also called Campaigns, or Donations, they are all the same type of form with commerce collection fields.

Designations: These are the holding containers or labels where monies are applied through the giving form.

Collections: The presentation of the designations inside the form. There are two primary collection displays: the simple (all on the page in a listing) and advanced (presented in a collection pop up window)

Form Build: The form is separate from the collection display in giving. The form is like the picture frame which holds the collection as a picture. This means that a collection can be moved from giving form to giving form.

Suggested Naming conventions

Building Fields - nameoftheform_nameofthefield

(example: class2004reunion_dinnerselection)

Building Roles - nameoftheform_nameofthefield_nameofthevalue

(example:classof2004reunion_dinnerselection_vegetarian)

For your reference: Vocabulary and Suggested Naming Convention documents (PDF).