Decommissioning Contribution Forms - Maintenance and routine

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.

1. 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!)
    
2. 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.
    
3. 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. 
    
4. 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.
    
5. 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).
6. 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.