What are the best ways to track which donations may have come specifically from Social Media posts? Is there a way to tag these donations on the system? Can it be done automatically?
What are your best practices for being able to report the source of each donation?
Best answer by torvic vardamis
Totally doable in EveryAction. The quick idea: use Source Codes on your Online Actions form, then override the code in the link you post to social. For example:
https://secure.everyaction.com/<formid>?source=SOC-Facebook&ms=FY25_Spring&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=yearend
That source= tags the gift with your Source Code, and ms= is the Market Source Code if you want a broader campaign tag. If you prefer using an exact code ID, you can pass sourceid= instead. EA will even auto-create a new Source Code if the source= value doesn’t exist yet, filing it under Forms Autogenerated.
As for reporting, you can run your usual contribution reporting and filter or group by Source Code, or use the Source Codes search tools with wildcards to roll up families of codes like SOC-FB%. Save the filters so you can rerun during the campaign.
Here’s a few docs that are relevant here:
-Query strings you can use with Online Actions, including source, sourceid, and ms.
-Source Codes overview and how they’re applied and tracked.
-Searching and reporting on Source Codes, including wildcards.
I hope this helps and I’m excited to hear what others might suggest.
The URL you distribute can be modified with either a Market Source value, which is just plain text, or with a source code that overrides the one already present on the form. Both Market Source and Source code can be used in your searches and reporting to see what’s coming in from where.
Most often the orgs I work with opt to use the Market Source because its plain text and easy for teams to implement. Just add ?ms=value where “value” is something like “twitter” “fb” “bluesky” or even “sms” if you’re using an external SMS tool.
+2
Totally doable in EveryAction. The quick idea: use Source Codes on your Online Actions form, then override the code in the link you post to social. For example:
https://secure.everyaction.com/<formid>?source=SOC-Facebook&ms=FY25_Spring&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=yearend
That source= tags the gift with your Source Code, and ms= is the Market Source Code if you want a broader campaign tag. If you prefer using an exact code ID, you can pass sourceid= instead. EA will even auto-create a new Source Code if the source= value doesn’t exist yet, filing it under Forms Autogenerated.
As for reporting, you can run your usual contribution reporting and filter or group by Source Code, or use the Source Codes search tools with wildcards to roll up families of codes like SOC-FB%. Save the filters so you can rerun during the campaign.
Here’s a few docs that are relevant here:
-Query strings you can use with Online Actions, including source, sourceid, and ms.
-Source Codes overview and how they’re applied and tracked.
-Searching and reporting on Source Codes, including wildcards.
I hope this helps and I’m excited to hear what others might suggest.
We embed our donation forms directly into our website. Will this also work for embedded forms?
Hey Jeff,
So long as you’re linking directly to the page, yes it should. If they land on a homepage and then navigate to an embedded page, that would break. www.myorganization.org/donate?ms=bluesky should work fine though.
Yeah, that’s the other thing: it’s pretty easy to test out if you want to use any live embedded form - you can just enter the ?ms=value (make sure you load the page from the start with that in place) and then confirm the results in your reporting a few minutes later - then adjust before blasting it out if need be.
Already have an account? Login
No account yet? Create an account
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.
