Donation Page¶
Donation Page Overview¶
Donation – Donation Pages ask your users to contribute, order Products, or support Candidates (through bundled contributions) using a credit card, PayPal, or ACH direct debit.
To accept credit card donations, you must have a payment account set up with a merchant vendor we integrate with. You can accept recurring donations and donations in many currencies.
To accept PayPal donations, we need information about your PayPal Account.
To accept ACH direct debit, you need a merchant account with Braintree and you must sign up for their ACH beta program.
You can also manage donations through ActionKit.
To get started, click “Add a page” on the Pages dashboard and select Donation. The settings and options are described below.
What Do The Options On This Screen Mean?¶
Action Basics Screen¶
Title, Name, Notes¶
Enter the title the user will see at the top of the web page.
Edit the short name if you don’t want to use what is auto-generated from the title. This forms part of the URL for this page. Only use letters, numbers, underscores, and dashes. No spaces or other characters.
For example, the URL for a signup page is http://docs.actionkit.com/signup/your_short_name/.
Use the Notes field to associate information with a page for internal use. Notes are displayed on the Pages Tab and Browse All screen.
Tags¶
You can associate one or more tags with your page by selecting them from the drop down.
Tags are categories that you can associate with a Page or Mailing. They may represent issue areas or campaigns (e.g. food_safety or Paris_climate_talks_campaign).
You can use Tags to group Pages or Mailings. Tags are displayed on the Dashboard and the Browse all listing, and you can filter by Tag, so for example, you can quickly view the list of all the Tages you have created for a particular campaign.
Tags can also be used to group users for mailing targeting and analysis. Users who take action on a Page are associated with that Page’s Tag(s).
Every user who takes action on the Page is associated with the Page’s current Tags. There is no way to associate only some of those who took action on a Page with a Tag (for example, you can’t tag only donors giving over $X on a page).
Note
Users are only associated with a Page’s current Tags, not with the Tags from the time the user took action. If you remove a Tag from a Page, any users who’ve already taken action on the Page will not retain any association with the Tag you removed.
Read more about managing Tags including how to add Tags and reorder your Tag list.
Minimum Amount¶
Users will not be able to make a donation in an amount less than your minimum. Often this is set to an amount that just covers the transaction fee charged by your vendor.
Payment Account¶
To accept donations in ActionKit you must have a payment account with a vendor we integrate with. You can accept credit cards through ActionKit donation pages with a traditional merchant vendor account with Braintree, Authorize.net, PayFlow Pro or PayPal. You can also accept PayPal payments where the user logs into their own PayPal account and pays with their preferred method with a standard PayPal account.
ActionKit records each donation and generates a request to the vendor, asking them to process the donation and deposit the funds in your bank account. We also provide an interface for prompting changes (like refunds), so these are captured in your ActionKit database as well.
PayPal¶
Note
This section references PayPal’s standard payment product, not PayPal’s PayFlow Pro.
ActionKit’s PayPal implementation offers support for both traditional CC processing (like that provided by Braintree, Auth.net and PayFlow Pro) as well as paying via PayPal accounts. Users set up their PayPal accounts to use whatever payment method they prefer (e.g. credit card, bank account). When users pay via PayPal accounts they are redirected to the PayPal site and then back to ActionKit after they approve the payment.
Read more about our PayPal integration.
Suggested Ask Formula¶
You can customize the suggested donation amounts shown to a previous donor based on that user’s giving history.
Recognized users will see a suggested donation and any larger amounts you enter on the Edit content screen. You define the formula used to set the suggested amount, basing it on the donor’s highest previous gift, 2nd highest gift, average gift,most recent gift or total over a particular time period. Imported donations are included.
You can also insert the same ask amount in a mailing using the suggested ask Snippet in the mailer.
To read more about defining the formula used to set this amount, read Suggested Ask Rules.
Allow International Addresses¶
If you wish to accept credit card donations from users with international addresses, you must:
1 Select the Allow international addresses checkbox.
2 Turn off AVS with your merchant vendor.
3 Modify your donation page template to include country.
International addresses will not be accepted unless you’ve completed all three steps.
Donations must still be in U.S. dollars unless you are set up to receive donations in other currencies as outlined below.
ActionKit still requires state and zip if the user selects the United States as their billing country. Neither postal nor region are required if the user selects any other country.
Users with JavaScript will see the correct fields when they switch countries. Users without JavaScript will see all four fields (region, state, zip and postal) all the time but if they fill out extra fields they will be ignored.
Display Currency Switcher (Formerly known as Use Account Switcher)¶
To accept donations in other currencies you need to use Braintree as your merchant vendor. You’ll need to do some additional set up with Braintree for each currency you wish to accept. Then you can create Donation Pages, send mailings, generate reports, etc. using the currency. The set up is similar to using other languages; donation campaigns will generally need distinct Pages and mailings per currency. Details, including how to get started are at currencies.html.
Goal¶
Thermometers can increase action rates, so we’ve made it easy to add one to your page.
To include a thermometer on your page, enter a numeric goal in the goal section and select the type of actions to count. The options are:
Actions – total actions
Actions – unique users
Dollars raised
Thermometer appearance is set by the progress_meter Template. A designer or developer can customize the appearance by editing the Template and set the goal to automatically increase if it’s reached.
Note
All actions, complete and incomplete, are counted regardless of status. So on pages that require multiple steps, like call pages that require targeting, the thermometer will count all users that submit on the first screen, even if they do not “complete” the action by submitting the call report on the second screen.
List¶
A mailing list is just a group of your users who can be emailed (e.g. they haven’t bounced or unsubscribed). Users join a list by taking action on a page (or you can add them through the Uploader). Users who take action on this page are added to the list selected if they’re not already on it.
You may have multiple Lists, but you can only choose one for this page, unless you customize your Templateset to add users to more than one list.
Your page should clearly indicate that signers will be subscribed to your mailing list. This is essential to maintaining good deliverability.
You can also edit your Templateset to require users to opt-in to the mailing list instead.
Read more about creating and using mailing Lists.
Note
If you have users from Canada, please note that the Original Templateset includes code to change your page to require opt-in, if the user selects Canada from a country drop down. A checkbox is displayed, unchecked by default, that the user can select if they’d like to be added to your list. This is to assist you in complying with Canada’s anti-spam legislation, although we also suggest consulting an attorney to find out more about the law and decide on the best approach for your organization.
You can find the code to add to your existing Templatesets in the country_select template. It includes a details link for your users where we’ve noted that an unchecked consent box won’t unsubscribe a current member.
If a Canadian user has noscript on, they can’t subscribe even if they check the box.
If you’re concerned that the Confirmation Email may be interpreted as a violation of the law for users who didn’t opt-in, you can suppress sending a Confirmation Email by adding the tag skip_confirmation to your page as a hidden value, triggered for users from Canada.
Language¶
This option is only relevant if you’ve set up Languages aside from English in your instance. If so, the additional Languages will show here in the drop down under More Options.
Select a Language to:
Save this as the user’s language for any user who takes action on this page.
Use the translated system messages (e.g. “Email is required”), if you added these when you set up the Language.
Tell ActionKit to pre-select the default Templateset for the Language on the Edit content screen and to pre-select the default Email Wrapper for the Language for your Confirmation Email – if you’ve set defaults for these.
If you don’t want the user’s language to change because they took action on this page, you can select ‘———’ from the Language list.
To learn more about ActionKit’s Language functionality, including how to add Languages and translate error messages see Languages and Multilingual Campaigns.
Multilingual Campaign¶
Multilingual Campaigns allow you to associate multiple Pages with each other for tracking and reporting. If you’ve selected a Goal, the thermometer for Pages that share the same Multilingual Campaign shows the combined results.
Also, your end users will see links at the top right of the page so they can toggle to their preferred Language.
You can add a Multilingual Campaign from the Pages Tab or from the Multilingual Options section on the Action basics screen when you’re creating a page.
Create a Multilingual Campaign for each Page that you plan to translate. Then select the Campaign and the Language when you create each translation.
On the Pages Tab, if you click the grey Multilingual Campaigns link, you’ll see summary information for each Campaign including the count of action takers and a list of the Pages showing each Language.
Spam Checks¶
Only relevant if you’ve enabled spam checking. Use this to tell ActionKit not to apply the checks to this page.
Is Model¶
You can mark a page as a Model, as you can a mailing, and use it as the basis for future Pages of the same type.
Models can be used to save standard text you include in the Confirmation Email or the tell-a-friend message for Petition Pages, or to save your most commonly used Donation page settings, or as a shortcut for creating C3 versus C4 Donation Pages with the appropriate page wrapper, merchant vendor account, Email Wrapper and From Line.
When you copy a Model, all the settings remain the same, except the copy is not marked as a Model.
Designate your Model by checking the Is model box on the Action basics screen under More options.
Click on the light gray Models link at the top of the page list on your Pages tab to see a list. Or use the filter options on the Browse all screen.
Model pages do not work differently than other pages. Users can still submit on a Model page, if you make the URL public.
Note
Only users with the Pages - plus Model Pages permission and superusers can create and edit model pages. The checkbox to designate a page as a model will not show up for other users.
Products¶
ActionKit provides basic support for product sales and give aways. Products can be premiums, merchandise for sale, or something less tangible (for example, ‘adopting’ an endangered tiger).
Products are used with donation pages. If you have set up any products, you’ll be able to select them in the More options section on the Action Basics screen when you create your page.
The default layout offers users options to select a product and to make an additional donation. You can change the layout, offer products with no option for an additional donation, or allow users to donate without selecting a product on a page with products by editing the donate.html template.
Our product system is not designed to function as a storefront. If you need shipping and tax calculations and fulfillment tracking, we recommend using an external storefront and integrating the data using our API.
Candidates¶
Use this option to create bundling pages for candidates. You need to add Candidates first before they’ll be available for inclusion on a Donation page.
The end user fills in the amount they’d like to give to each candidate and there’s an option to make a regular donation to your organization.
In the Original Templateset, employer and occupation are automatically required for Pages with candidates. PACs can easily copy the code to require these fields everywhere or you can use it to adapt your Templatesets for bundling for non-federal races with different rules.
Fraud Filters¶
Fraudsters will sometimes use Donation Pages to test whether stolen credit cards are functional or not. These carding attempts can incur transaction and chargeback fees for your organization.
Clients who use PayFlow Pro, Authorize.net or Braintree as their payment gateway can set global- and per-page fraud limits.
The fraud scores are generated using the MaxMind minFraud service. We incur a small charge for each fraud score calculated, but do not pass that charge along to you.
MaxMind looks at a lot of factors: whether the user’s IP address is that of a known fraudster, whether the country of the card issuer matches the user’s current location, HTTP request headers that can help tell automated scripts from real users, and more.
The filters can reject some real donations although the benefit of avoiding fraud may outweigh any donations lost, especially if you’re having a problem with fraud.
The filtering process logs details to the core_donationattemptlog table, where you can review exactly how many attempts were rejected and the details of the rejections.
By default, ActionKit blocks donations from IPs in 5 high risk countries: Brazil, Estonia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Vietnam. If any of those are high value for your organization, we can remove those countries on a per-client basis. Note that this comes with an increased risk of carding attempts, which can incur transaction and chargeback fees.
Read more if you want to enable fraud filters for your instance.
Page Fields¶
Custom page fields are a powerful and flexible tool that allows you to add a section of content or code to an individual page.
For example, if you want to ask users to tweet about an action they’ve taken, you could add a page field called “twitter” and include a suggested message specific to the page. If you have a Protect Parrots petition your sample message might be “Parrots are smart. I just signed to save them here: action_URL”
Page fields you’ve created are available on the Action basics screen for each page.
Note
If you don’t see a Page fields section on this screen, no custom page fields have been created for your organization.
Use this syntax to include page fields in your templatesets or to reference them when creating a page: {{ page.custom_fields.YOUR_FIELD_NAME_HERE }}. Or, if your custom page field contains template tags or filters that need to be interpreted, then use this syntax instead: {% include_tmpl page.custom_fields.YOUR_FIELD_NAME_HERE %}.
Edit Content Screen¶
Templateset¶
Customize the look and feel of your Pages using Templates. Our templating system separates the graphic design work of creating pages with your organization’s style from the campaign work of setting goals, crafting your message, and creating content.
Templates define everything about the appearance of your pages from your page layout and colors, to the fields displayed in your user forms and the image for your thermometers. Each Page you create in ActionKit combines input from multiple Templates.
A Templateset is just a group of all the available Templates; each ActionKit Page combines input from multiple Templates.
To set a Page’s appearance you just select the appropriate Templateset from the dropdown on the Edit Content screen.
Donation pages use the Donate template, plus the Shared templates that all pages use.
Host Outside ActionKit¶
You can host your page with ActionKit or on your own server. Either way you can access all the same functionality - your end users will be recognized, error messages returned, data submitted to the database, Confirmation Emails sent, etc.
To host a page yourself, you need to copy some code into the HTML on your server. Select the Host outside ActionKit box on the Edit content screen when you create your page. Then view the source and download the code from the Preview/Get HTML screen.
When you check the box, we prefill some generic content in the text boxes. If you want the correct content to be included in the code you download, just overwrite the filler. Otherwise, skip the text boxes and enter your text in your own CMS.
We also display a URL field. Enter the URL for your page and we’ll hook it up to the View link on the Pages Tab.
Read more tips and suggestions in the embedding section.
Content¶
The content for your pages is entered here. The text boxes for all page types share the same basic functionality.
WYSIWYG¶
Most everywhere that you can enter and edit text (e.g. page content text boxes, mailing body), we’ve provided a basic WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) and a syntax coloring editor (CodeMirror) as well as the standard browser text area.
Select Visual to use the WYSIWYG editor and view the rendered content without writing your own HTML. The toolbar has buttons you can use for standard functions and formatting. Just hover over the tool to see the name. For example, you can click to indent a paragraph or to insert an image. The show/hide toolbars button opens a second bar with additional formatting options.
Select Code in the toolbar to have color-coding and line numbers for easier editing of the code. Different elements, like Javascript or CSS, are given different tinted backgrounds or text colors.
Select Plain to remove all highlighting.
Note
The visual editor, like other WYSIWYG editors, may at times add more than you expect to the HTML, like extra <p> tags, and at other times, strip out things, like styling. You may want to avoid the visual editor when updating code-heavy items such as mailing wrappers and templatesets, and limit the use of the visual editor to areas that are more content-heavy, like page text and mailing body content.
Spell Check¶
We’ve made it possible for you to enable your browser’s native spell checking when using the WYSIWYG visual editor, at least for most major browsers. The keyboard shortcut, menubar command, or context menu option required to enable spell checking is different in each browser, but typically you can right-click (or control-click, or two-finger-click) on an editor panel to reveal the ‘Spelling’ or ‘Spelling and Grammar’ commands for it. Firefox users may have to begin by selecting ‘Install Dictionary’ to enable spellchecking the first time, if they have not already done so. This enables ‘check spelling as you type’ functionality in Mac Safari, Chrome and Firefox as well as possibly Windows for Chrome, Firefox and IE 10+.
Snippets¶
Snippets are click-to-insert template tags used to display information specific to each user within the text on your Pages and in mailings.
For example, if you wish to identify the user by name on a page or in a mailing, you would expand the User header under Snippets and select First name. The following Snippet of code will be inserted into your HTML:
{{ user.first_name|default:"Friend" }}
ActionKit can only display conditional content for recognized users. Users who aren’t recognized will see the default value defined for the specific Snippet. For example, if you insert First name an unrecognized user will see the default, ‘Friend’. You can change the default value by typing over it when you insert it, but not universally for the Snippet.
Some Snippets don’t have a default value and you’d generally only want to use them in cases where the users who will see them have a value for the field. For example, it only make sense to use the average donation Snippet with past donors.
Note
Always view your page as a recognized user to make sure your Snippets are displaying as you’d expect.
The Snippets available for Pages are slightly different than those available for mailings, including the Confirmation Email. View the Snippets and the code they insert for Pages and mailings.
You can define your own custom snippets to make it easy to insert frequently-used bits of text and code into your pages and mailings.
Amount Settings¶
Amount Order: The donation amounts can be shown in order from high to low or low to high.
Show Other Amount: Check this box to show an other option to the user, so they can fill in a contribution amount different than the suggested amounts shown on the page.
Donation Amounts: The amounts you enter here will be displayed as suggested donation amounts on your Donation page.
You can select an amount as the default, which means it will be pre-selected on your page.
If your page also uses a Suggested Ask formula, here’s how these amounts and the Suggested Ask amount interact:
For users who aren’t recognized by ActionKit, the donation amounts entered here will be displayed. Read about which users will be recognized.
For recognized users who have never given, the Suggested Ask amount is used in place of the lowest amount on your list. The amount under Make ask amount in the Suggested Ask Conditions section for the top row is used.
For recognized users who have previously given, the Make ask amount column shows the lowest suggested donation that will be shown to all users with a total less than the amount in the first column for whichever criteria you select (e.g. Highest Donation); all larger donation amounts entered here will show as well.
For example, if your formula is based on the donor’s Highest Previous Contribution (HPC) and the user has an HPC of $150 and the suggested ask is $175, the amounts shown on the page will be $175 and any donation amounts that are larger.
There is an exception to this rule. If the donor would only see one or two donation amounts on the page because the Suggested Ask is higher than all but one donation amount, ActionKit will display all of your donation amounts (just as if the user wasn’t recognized).
For example, if a user has an HPC of $1000, the Suggested ask amount is $500 in the default formula. If the largest donation amounts entered in this section are $500 and $1000, the user would only see two suggested amounts. Instead they will see all the amounts you enter in this section.
After-action Info Screen¶
Redirect URL¶
In the Required section, you’ll see the URL for the thank you page with the text you entered in the previous step. If you’d like to direct the user to a different page, enter the URL here.
The URL is always pre-filled, but you can change it if you’d like to direct users to another page instead. Just enter the URL. For example, you might want to have your users land on a Donation page after they sign a Petition.
If you change the redirect, be sure to submit from your page to confirm that you entered the URL correctly.
Advanced option: Use a hidden input with the name redirect and value of a URL will change the after-action page to the URL you entered.
See also How do I pass a source code through to a redirect?
Note
The redirect URL is generated when the page loads; you can’t use snippets to pull in content the user enters on the page. To dynamically redirect based on user responses, use JavaScript or add a meta refresh on the thanks page: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='https://roboticdogs.actionkit.com/act/sample?zip={{ user.zip|urlencode }}'" />
Confirmation Email¶
The Confirmation Email usually thanks the user for their action.
You can use Snippets to insert conditional content. To include a Snippet in the subject, cut and paste the Snippet from those available for the body.
There’s a Snippet that allows you to include the user’s response to any survey questions (aka action fields). The syntax is action.custom_fields.QUESTION_NAME. You can only do this for survey questions that are on the page associated with the Confirmation Email.
Note
Sometimes you’ll want to include a link to a higher-bar, or more difficult, action the user can take. For example, a Petition page Confirmation Email might thank the user and ask him or her to call their legislator about the same issue. To do this, you need to create the second action page (the Call page in this example). Then enter the link to the second action in this email and in your Thank you text box on the Edit content screen.
Your Confirmation Email must include an unsubscribe link. Not many users unsubscribe as a result of the thank you email, but offering that option contributes to your standing with the various ISPs.
To create your Confirmation Email you need to:
1 Select the Email wrapper from the dropdown list. Wrappers define the header and footer of your email. See creating email wrappers.
2 Select the Email From Line entry from the dropdown list, add a new From Line, or fill in a From Line for use in this mailing only by clicking “use a custom From Line”. See From Line.
3 Enter your Email subject.
4 Enter your Email body.
There are several donation specific snippets available for the confirmation email.
Cool Stuff
Two examples for conditionalizing text for monthly and one-time gift options are described here.
Some snippets are available that are for use only when your donor has made a recurring commitment.
You can access a user’s new profile in the confirmation email. For example:
{% with orderrecurring as profile %}
Your next payment of ${{ profile.amount }} will be on {{ profile.next_payment_date }}.
{% endwith %}
It’s a good idea to include links in the thank you email to the Update recurring donation and Cancel recurring donation pages so donors can update or cancel their recurring commitments.
Tell-a-friend¶
If you enable the tell-a-friend widget for a page, your user is shown a box where they can fill in friends’ email addresses. They can also click a link to mail friends directly through their preferred email program.
The tell-a-friend options show on the thank you screen (and also on the action page for petitions). You can modify your Templateset to create a standalone TAF page.
If the user enters addresses through the widget, the friend will receive a message with the user’s email in the from line while the email is technically sent from your ActionKit domain (to improve delivery speed and reliability).
The user cannot edit the subject or the body of the message but they can add a short personal note. Snippets are available for these messages as well.
Alternatively, a user can follow the link to mail friends through their email program. This option opens the user’s default email program and prefills the body and subject (in the email programs that support this). The user will be able to edit the subject and body of the email in this case and the email will come directly from the user.
We don’t have an address sucker option, as we’ve found repeatedly in testing that this option depresses the action rate.
Note
Spammers may try to use these pages to send unsolicited email with links to their site from your good IP address. To block this misuse of your forms, the TAF widget won’t send any messages that link to a URL outside of the following: your domain, domains you’ve added, the URL in your original TAF message, or Youtube or Facebook. If a user includes a link outside these categories, that user won’t receive a Confirmation Email and none of their TAF messages will be sent. These rules apply to any ActionKit page, whether or not we’re hosting it.
You can see a count of how many tell-a-friend emails any user sends through the widget in the taf_emails_sent column in the core_action table. If the friend follows the link in the TAF message and takes action, the source of the action will be taf. Tell-a-friend emails sent through the user’s own email program aren’t included in the count.
To create your tell-a-friend message you must:
1 Check the Enable Tell-a-friend widget checkbox.
2 Enter the Tell-a-friend subject. This subject cannot be edited by users, unless they choose to email friends through their own email client.
3 Enter the Tell-a-friend body. Don’t forget to enter the full URL for your page in the body. (Use the “Full page URL” Snippet in the Snippet page section to insert this: {{ page.canonical_url }})”.
Sharing¶
To view or customize Sharing for your page, toggle open the Sharing section to display previews of how your page will appear on Facebook, Bluesky, and Twitter.
Text below the previews will indicate whether the page’s current Templateset supports customization of the share messages, and whether it supports tracking of share links.
If customization is enabled, you can click on the sharing previews to edit the text and image.
Any images that appear in your page are shown as candidates for the Facebook image, making it easy to pick one of them to be featured.
The standard thanks template includes social sharing buttons that encourage users to tell their friends about the action they’ve just taken.
These Post to Facebook, Share on Bluesky, and Share on Twitter buttons send users to the social networks’ built-in sharing functions, passing along information about your page.
If your Templateset includes certain required code tags, you can customize the sharing messages associated with your page and view reports of sharing-related traffic.
If you see a message that your Templateset doesn’t support all of the Sharing functionality, your designer or developer can update your templates.
Sharing Reports¶
There are two standard dashboard reports that present queries of sharing-related traffic.
The Share Stats for Date Range report summarizes sharing traffic across all Pages on your site within a given date range. It includes overall totals as well as breakdowns by page, by sharing network, by date, the top twenty users, and by sharing generation.
The Share Stats for Page report summarizes sharing traffic for a particular page on your site. It includes overall totals as well as breakdowns by sharing network, by date, the top twenty users, and by sharing generation.
Each of these queries includes columns for how many users shared, how many share links were created, how many of those were clicked, how many were acted on, and the total number of resulting actions and new users.
The breakdowns by type show the shares and resulting traffic for Facebook, Bluesky, Twitter, and user-copied share links.
The by page query shows the most active Pages receiving traffic from user share links.
The by user query highlights the most active sharing users, sorted by the number of actions their share links have generated.
The by generation query reveals what proportion of the shares are from users you’re driving to the page versus those coming from downstream shares and “shares-of-shares” viral traffic. It distinguishes between shares by users who arrived from a mailing or other web link (1st generation), versus users who clicked on a share link on Facebook/Bluesky/Twitter and then shared again (2nd generation), and so forth.
Notification Emails¶
Notifications are emails to someone aside from the action taker, prompted by actions on the Page.
You can use these for a variety of purposes including:
sending an email to the honoree about gifts made in their honor,
alerting field organizers to each new event created in an event campaign,
notifying a campaign director every 1,000 new actions on a page,
emailing your development staff for each new recurring commitment.
Create your notifications and then select the ones you want to associate with each page on the After action info screen. Each action can prompt multiple notification emails.
Notification emails will only send if there are values for the subject line, to emails, from email, and mailing body. So you can use conditional content to control whether the notification requirements have been met.
Warning
Blank mailing bodies may still have <p> tags and comment code that process as content. To block sending, use {% requires_value foo %} in the body, or use a conditional in the subject, to email, or from email.
We provide a few sample notifications that you can use or customize:
In honor of: This example shows how you’d prompt a notification email to the honoree after each gift in his/her honor. First you need to add an action field with the label ‘action_in_honor_of_email’ to the Donation Page template you’ll be using. Then you can use the to line in the example – {{ action.custom_fields.in_honor_of_email }}. The example also shows some conditional content you might include in the notification email by adding additional custom action fields to your template.
Tell staff about monthly donation: In this example, the subject includes the criteria to prompt the sending of the email. Whichever staff you select from the list or enter in the “to” line will receive this notification after each new monthly donation is created. The body includes some conditional content.
Notify every 1000: In this example, the send criteria is in the body and the subject includes conditional content.
Here are some other examples that aren’t included in your instance but that you might add:
Notify someone when a donation is greater than $250:
Subject: {% if action.order.total > 249 %}New $250+ Donation!{% endif %}
* Notify event hosts of new attendees:
To: {% for host in action.event.hosts %}{{ host.email }}{% if not forloop.last %},{% endif %}{% endfor %}
Subject: Subject {{ user.first_name }} has RSVPed for your event
Read about adding notifications.
How Should I Test My Page?¶
As soon as you save a page in ActionKit it’s “live”, meaning any user who ends up at the URL can see the page and take action. Of course, users generally don’t find a page unless you’ve shared it by sending an email or linking to it from your website or sharing it on Facebook or another public forum.
Always test a page before you share it with your users and again if you make changes.
A basic test plan for donation pages follows.
The only way to test a donation page is to submit an actual donation using a real credit card. Merchant vendors offer a sandbox where you can test with a fake credit card number, but there may be (and often are) differences between the sandbox code and the live code used to process your donations.
Important
Please note when testing or when processing multiple manual donations that we have built in a delay time between donations to protect the user from erroneously clicking the submit button on a slow donation form. The default is 5 minutes. You can change this and other organization-wide default settings from the CONFIG.
We outline below how to refund your test donation afterward.
If you’ve enabled a Suggested Ask Formula in for your donation page, we suggest running additional tests as a recognized user.
1 View the page by clicking View for the page in the Dashboard or the Browse All listing, or by clicking View on site on the page edit screens.
2 Proof the page and check the appearance. Hit the back button and then select the appropriate step at the top of the screen to make changes.
Make sure the suggested donation amounts are what you expect.
If monthly giving is enabled make sure you see both the monthly and one-time donation options.
If this page is associated with a product, be sure the product is shown with the appropriate text and images.
3 Donation pages require users to enter complete address information regardless of the settings in the Action basics screen.
If there is a shippable product on the page, shipping address is also required.
If you’ve required additional information or you want to test the required field functionality, you can try submitting without information you expect to be required. You should see an error message like
Zip required.4 Enter the required information and a valid credit card number then submit.
5 View and proof the thank you page.
If you entered a Redirect URL for this page, confirm that you land on the correct page.
If you enabled tell-a-friend, proof the tell-a-friend subject and message. Send yourself a tell-a-friend to confirm the functionality.
6 Check your email for a Confirmation Email if you enabled this option. Proof and check links (if there are any).
7 If you’d like to refund your test donation:
Search for yourself using your name or email from the Users tab.
Click on the User’s Action History link near the bottom in the left column.
Find the action row for the donation you just made and select Refund.
You may want to do additional testing for specific cases.
If you’re using a new, untested templateset, your testing should be more extensive and involve multiple browsers. Read about templateset testing here.
For most page types, when you test your page, your actions are recorded just as your user’s actions are. You can confirm that the data you entered was recorded in the database.
Finally, you may want to check optional elements you’ve included like snippets and taf.
Where Can I Find Donation Data?¶
Donations in ActionKit are a type of action so all the standard action data like user_id, page_id, and action source are saved to the core_action table for each donation attempt.
Donations are more complicated than other action types though and a number of tables are involved. A row is also added to the core_order table with donation specific information including the amount. If the donation was processed through ActionKit (not imported) a row is added to core_transaction with information from the merchant vendor if the transaction failed. If the donation was imported, a placeholder row is added to the core_transaction table with the account field set to import.
A row is added to core_orderrecurring when a new recurring commitment is created.
Read about the information available in each table and how to view specific donation categories (failed attempts, product orders, recurring donations, etc.) under data capture details.
The following donation reports are built in: