Case Study: Making donation forms fun again!
Wildlife Victoria has been a valued client for over 15 years. As a not-for-profit organisation, receiving donations is essential to supporting their mission and the continuation of their impactful work.
Some years ago, they adopted Salesforce and integrated Payments2Us, a popular app for processing donations (and also a Mity client). Payments2Us is effective for creating donation forms and allocating funds to various campaigns, but there’s a drawback – the payment forms themselves are visually outdated. Built on jQuery Mobile (hello 2012!), they lack the polished, modern feel that today’s donors expect.
Recognising this, we initially addressed the issue back in 2014 by designing a custom lead-in form with HTML and CSS, improving the donor experience considerably. This three-step form allowed donors to select a donation amount, understand how their contribution would support Wildlife Victoria, and choose between a one-off or monthly donation. Upon progressing to the final step, their information was passed securely to the Payments2Us form within an iframe, streamlining the payment process.
Payments2Us also allowed us to customise certain aspects by hiding redundant fields via URL parameters, reducing clutter and improving the flow for donors. This setup served Wildlife Victoria well for many years. However, as the need for varied campaigns grew, replicating and updating the code for each new campaign became time-consuming, especially when some campaigns required multiple form variations.
Here’s where Statamic came to the rescue. Wildlife Victoria’s previous site was built on Joomla, which posed limitations for custom development. With the shift to Statamic, we developed a solution that enables Wildlife Victoria’s team to create and manage their own campaign and donation forms within the Statamic control panel – no coding required!
By combining a form and collection within Statamic, we removed the need for Mity to update the code for every campaign. The form is split into two parts: the initial steps are powered by Statamic’s form features, providing an engaging donor experience. The final step integrates the Payments2Us form to securely process payments.
While Wildlife Victoria doesn’t need to edit the Statamic form itself, a new “Donation Forms” collection empowers them to customise each campaign. Using our Variable Number field type, they can set specific donation amounts, describe the impact of each contribution, and apply relevant Salesforce campaign values to ensure funds are directed to the appropriate campaign.
There’s no limit to how many forms they can create. For each campaign landing page, we added a block in the page builder that lets them select the relevant donation form. This flexibility allows Wildlife Victoria to tailor landing page content for different audiences and link to unique forms as needed.
The result is this lovely form.
It doesn’t stop there! We enabled URL parameters to accept data from email campaigns, which merges details from their EDM lists to personalise landing pages and pre-fill form fields like names and email addresses. This setup dynamically adjusts the content, ensuring it reads smoothly even if some data is missing.
But wait! There's STILL more!
Beyond personalisation, URL parameters can adjust fixed donation amounts based on previous donations. For example, if a past donor contributed $100, they might be prompted to consider a larger amount this time, all using the same form.
This customisation means that Wildlife Victoria can send one email campaign to thousands of recipients, each seeing a uniquely tailored donation form – a true game-changer for their fundraising efforts.
Michael Scruse
Michael brings his technical, web and sales expertise to every project, backed by over 30 years’ experience in the IT industry.
Michael is also a qualified chef, although cooking is now in a domestic kitchen. Michael is a bit of a history buff and is currently researching his own family history.
