With Year End around the corner, we’re starting to look at posting new or updated contribution forms for our donate page (we have two landing pages - one-time and monthly, though both allow for recurring or one-time).
A few questions related to best practices:
How often do others switch up the language in your contribution forms and autoresponders?
Do you just post the new form, or do you delete the other one in Online Actions too? If you don’t delete old ones, how do you keep things from getting too cluttered?
If you delete the form, what happens to a monthly donation tied to that form (IE started online in March 2024 and has kept processing)?
On that last point, we use the autoresponder tied to the contribution form for our automated receipts. So when we update our monthly donor auto-thank you, we have to go through and find every contribution form that still has an active recurring commitment and update each one. Does anyone have a way to “move” a recurring commitment to the most up-to-date form?
Best answer by Sally Heaven
Hey @jeff, these are good questions. Different organizations have different SOPs depending on their capacity and breadth of issues they work on or want to highlight, so what’s possible for one organization might not be possible for another. With that disclaimer, here are some thoughts about best practices.
Switching up language on forms: I have seen many nonprofits keep evergreen language on their main donation forms. If you change language frequently, you can just edit the language on the main form and autoresponders so you’re using the same form but different language. I’ve seen special, separate forms created for specific campaigns (like a spring membership drive, or a capital campaign, or a high-profile legislative campaign) when language, images, and reporting needs are distinct. For a main website donation form I would only change the form if we did a big rebrand, or switched to using Optimized Contribution Forms. (Which I highly recommend exploring if you haven’t yet!)
How often? there’s not one right answer for this, and should be determined by your mission. It’s good to review language at least annually to make sure it’s still relevant, like @Liz Ragland said. If your organization focuses on a lot of different issues that change all the time (legislation, regulations) you might want to change it more often. Regardless, I personally would just change language, and not the actual form itself, especially if it’s frequent.
Deleting forms: you don’t need to actually delete the form; you can deactivate it instead on the final step of the Online Actions form builder. When you choose a deactivation date, you can redirect any traffic to another URL or donation form. That’s the way to go, so if someone follows a link to an expired form they don’t get a 404 and can still make a donation. You may have meant that anyway but I wanted to state that explicitly.
Clutter: The clutter is from the admin perspective, not from the donor perspective, as long as you deactivate and redirect forms. I definitely understand the desire to keep things tidy in EveryAction, but if you use the platform for many years, you will inevitably have many forms. Deactivating them is a good practice when the campaign is over (and redirecting traffic to another form), and then on the Online Forms dashboard you can sort by only Published forms to see your active forms. That is usually a good way to reduce visual clutter.
Recurring gift autoresponder: you could use a Reusable for this, and insert the Reusable into all Thank You Email content for all of your forms. That would save you updating it for each form. Or you could make the language generic enough that it doesn’t matter if the form content changes (that’s probably what I would do).
Automations: to engage with active recurring donors regardless of when they made their gift, you can create an automation to send them stewardship content periodically. You don’t have to rely only on the transactional autoresponder for that. It’s also a good idea to have a communication stream to active recurring donors to keep them up to date on your activities and thank them for their steadfast commitment.
@jeff definitely want to hear from others but to get the discussion going”
How often to switch up the language on contribution forms and autoresponders - I would typically do this annually. I would work with the development department to make sure I wasn’t featuring a story or imagery they were planning to use for a seasonal appeal.
Re: form management and recurring giving dependencies - great question! I’m flagging this for others to chime in on!
@Kerry @Sally Heaven @Rumi Matsuyama @Dalila @Lark Valente wondering if you could chime in here and offer Jeff your perspective? Thx!
Hey @jeff, these are good questions. Different organizations have different SOPs depending on their capacity and breadth of issues they work on or want to highlight, so what’s possible for one organization might not be possible for another. With that disclaimer, here are some thoughts about best practices.
Switching up language on forms: I have seen many nonprofits keep evergreen language on their main donation forms. If you change language frequently, you can just edit the language on the main form and autoresponders so you’re using the same form but different language. I’ve seen special, separate forms created for specific campaigns (like a spring membership drive, or a capital campaign, or a high-profile legislative campaign) when language, images, and reporting needs are distinct. For a main website donation form I would only change the form if we did a big rebrand, or switched to using Optimized Contribution Forms. (Which I highly recommend exploring if you haven’t yet!)
How often? there’s not one right answer for this, and should be determined by your mission. It’s good to review language at least annually to make sure it’s still relevant, like @Liz Ragland said. If your organization focuses on a lot of different issues that change all the time (legislation, regulations) you might want to change it more often. Regardless, I personally would just change language, and not the actual form itself, especially if it’s frequent.
Deleting forms: you don’t need to actually delete the form; you can deactivate it instead on the final step of the Online Actions form builder. When you choose a deactivation date, you can redirect any traffic to another URL or donation form. That’s the way to go, so if someone follows a link to an expired form they don’t get a 404 and can still make a donation. You may have meant that anyway but I wanted to state that explicitly.
Clutter: The clutter is from the admin perspective, not from the donor perspective, as long as you deactivate and redirect forms. I definitely understand the desire to keep things tidy in EveryAction, but if you use the platform for many years, you will inevitably have many forms. Deactivating them is a good practice when the campaign is over (and redirecting traffic to another form), and then on the Online Forms dashboard you can sort by only Published forms to see your active forms. That is usually a good way to reduce visual clutter.
Recurring gift autoresponder: you could use a Reusable for this, and insert the Reusable into all Thank You Email content for all of your forms. That would save you updating it for each form. Or you could make the language generic enough that it doesn’t matter if the form content changes (that’s probably what I would do).
Automations: to engage with active recurring donors regardless of when they made their gift, you can create an automation to send them stewardship content periodically. You don’t have to rely only on the transactional autoresponder for that. It’s also a good idea to have a communication stream to active recurring donors to keep them up to date on your activities and thank them for their steadfast commitment.
w/r/t the recurring gifts forms, I believe that once an RC is created from that form, it's not relying on the form to trigger the recurrence of the charge every month however and therefore, if you archive the form, it won't cancel the recurring gifts!
however, I do recall that if you set it up with a transactional receipt for every month, I do think that will die. Note that you can set up recurring commitments that only send an initial receipt for very first installment and not one every single time.
So I think if you archive the online forms that were generating transactional emailed receipts every month for recurring gifts, there isn't a way to continue having those receipts go out, though I would love a staffer like @torvic vardamis to confirm my recollection.
So I like Sally's idea of having an evergreen centralized reusable that all recurring gift transaction receipts can draw from!
Still it means that forms that created recurring commitments (where you were having it pump out an e-receipt every time and not just on the first installment creating the commitment) should probably not deleted/not archived, but maybe just renamed in such a way to make it clear that they are old legacy forms like ZZ old form xyz do not archive? Doesn't clear the clutter for you, but maybe helps manage it not sure
@torvic vardamis oh that’s great news!!! so even if you archive / deactivate a form, not only will the related recurring commitments current to attempt in the future, but the receipts will also be emailed each month!!!!???
