Giving Forms Overview
Our Giving Forms feature allows you to create custom donation forms in order to control the donation types, questions asked, and information gathered during the donation checkout process.
Your Giving Forms are the checkout experience that your donors will see when making their donations, whereas your Campaigns can be thought of as the funding bucket that a donor can designate their gift toward.
Creating & Customizing Giving Forms
You can create an unlimited number of customizable fundraising pages (or "giving forms") from your Harness Dashboard > Fundraising > Giving Forms.
To create a new giving form, select the +Add or +Create New buttons.
To edit an existing giving form, select the 3 dots under Actions, then select the Edit option.
What Can Be Customized in a Giving Form?
From the Actions Menu (the 3 stacked dots), you can edit a giving form's settings, preview how the giving form will appear to donors, create a duplicate of a giving form, set or remove a giving for as the default (learn more here), and delete a giving form that is no longer needed.
When creating a new giving form or editing an existing one, you will see 4 tabs across the top of the editor: General, Donation, Contact Info, and Custom Fields. Through those tabs you can edit:
General Tab
Giving Form Name
This is for internal use only to help you identify what the giving form is being used for. Donors will not see the name of the giving form. For your general donations, we suggest using a name such as "Main." For campaign-specific giving forms, name the giving form after the campaign/appeal that it's associated with.
Donation Tab
Default Donation Type
As the first option on the donations tab, this allows you to set which donation type of preselected on your fundraising page. This can be set to one-time, monthly, or Round-Ups as the preselected option.
Donation Types
Set which donation types should be available in your giving form. These include one-time, monthly, and Round-Ups. Each of these donation types has a section in the giving form's editor and has a toggle to enable or disable each donation type.
Custom Amounts
Allow donors to enter a custom donation amount. If allowed, set the min/max custom donation caps. The absolute minimum and maximum amounts for custom donation amounts are capped at $1.00 and $999,999.99. Custom donation amounts can be enabled or disabled for both one-time and monthly donations.
Suggested Amounts
Your one-time and monthly donations can each feature up to 4 preset amounts to be displayed on your fundraising pages. You can also set which suggested amount is the default (pre-selected). If you have less than 4 suggested amounts, and Add Suggestion button will appear to allow you to add more suggested amount to the giving form.
Impact Amounts
Add up to 4 Impact Amounts to display on your fundraising page (learn more about impact amounts). Use the checkbox next to an impact amount to add it to the giving form.
To display Impact Amounts, you must have suggested amounts that match/are the same dollar amount. If there are no suggested amounts or the dollar amounts do not match, the impact amounts will not be displayed (learn more here).
Campaigns
Set which Campaigns are available through the giving form and which is preselected (learn more about campaigns). By default all campaigns are automatically added to your fundraising pages.
However, you can turn that setting off and manually control which campaigns are available for a donor to select.
When All Campaigns is turned off, you will be responsible for managing which campaigns are available for a donor to select from. Be sure to manually update your available campaigns each time you create or archive a campaign.
Your Harness fundraising pages also include an "Area of Greatest Need" campaign (not actually a campaign) which is a way for allowing donors to give unrestricted funds. Area of Greatest Need can be removed by turning on the Require Campaign setting.
When Require Campaign is turned on, ensure you have created and enabled your own alternate campaigns for donors to select, otherwise donors will not be able to make a donation since you have required a campaign to be selected without providing a campaign to choose.
You can also set which campaign (if any) is pre-selected on your fundraising page. Is "No default campaign" is selected, then Area of Greatest Need will appear as pre-selected on the fundraising pages, unless you have removed Area of Greatest Need by turning on the Require Campaign option, in which case no campaign will be pre-selected.
SmartAsk Customization
SmartAsk aims to convert one-time donors to monthly donors. You can choose if SmartAsk should be included in a giving form, and if so, adjust the multiplier to the desired impact.
Cover Fees
Allow donors to cover your processing fees. If a donor covers the processing fees, they will cover 100% of the fee amount for most donations. You can also select if the cover fees option is checked or unchecked by default.
American Express cards have higher processing fees that your Harness fundraising pages are unable to account for. Because of this, donors using Amex who choose to cover the fees will not cover the entire fee amount. The difference will be deducted from your payout by Stripe.
In Honor / Memory
Allow donors to make their gift a tribute to someone. If enabled, you can control if you will allow email or physical letters for the acknowledgements that your organization will send. You can also require that the donor includes a message in their tribute gift. Tribute details will appear in your Tributes Report (learn more about tribute donations).
Notes / Comments
Allow donors to include a note along with their gift. Notes from donors will appear in your Notes Report.
Thank You Page
After making a donation, a donor will see the thank you page. By default, the message on your thank you page will display "Thank you for your donation!" Feel free to add a custom thank you message to replace this default verbiage.
Custom Thank You Page messages support plain text only, do not support hyperlinking text, and have a character limit of 1,000 characters.
You can also enable to donors can share the fundraising page via Facebook and Twitter, create a donor account if they haven't already, download a copy of their donation receipt (receipts are automatically emailed to one-time and monthly donors), and view their giving history.
Your thank you page message does not support images, videos, or hyperlinks. Only plain text can be added to your thank you page message.
Contact Info Tab
Phone Number
Ask donor's for their phone number, and you may set this as a required field.
Mailing Address
Ask donor's for their mailing address, and you may set this as a required field.
Employer Matching
If you are subscribed to Double the Donation and have entered your public and private API keys under your Integration settings, then you may enable employer matching. You may also set this as a required field.
If you have not entered your public and private API keys into the Harness integration or you are not subscribed to Double the Donation, do not enable Employer Matching, and do not set it as a required field. Doing so will prevent donors from being able to make donations.
Custom Fields Tab
Add Custom Fields that you have created to any giving form by selecting the plus (+) icon next to the custom field (learn more about custom fields). You may also mark custom fields as required. To remove a custom field from a giving form, select the minus (-) icon next to the custom field.
What is the Default Giving Form?
Think of the default giving form as your "General Donation" page, meaning that it should contain all the donation types, campaigns (unless specific campaigns need to be hidden), and questions you'd like presented during a donation. Your current default giving form will display a Default tag to the right of it's name.
We recommend making this default giving form as "Open" as possible in terms of the options provided to the donor when making the donation. You can always make your other giving forms more specific, but this "default" giving form should be more inclusive of all the potential donation options from a supporter.
Your Harness floating donate button that you install on your website can only and will always display your default giving form's settings regardless of which campaign a donor selects, even if you have linked that campaign to an alternate giving form. If you would like to trigger your floating donate button to open featuring an alternative giving form/gift type please see our Floating Donate Button Pop-Up Guide for instructions and a tutorial video.
If you would like to to set an alternate giving form as your default so that it is featured through your Harness floating donate button, select the 3 dots to the right of the giving form in the Actions column, then select the Make Default option.
If no giving form is set as the default giving form, then your Harness donate button will not use any of your giving forms. Instead, a generic checkout will be used that does not take into account any of the settings within any of your giving forms.
How Do Donors Interact With Giving Forms?
Sharing Giving Forms With Donors
Giving Forms are the checkout experience that donor see when making a donation. Donors will access your default giving form through your website's Harness donate button.
Donor can also access specific giving forms through direct links that you share with them. To share a direct link, you'll first need to copy the link's URL which can be found in the Link column under Fundraising > Giving Forms by right clicking on the link and selecting the Copy Link Address option.
What Donors See When Using Giving Forms
When a donor uses your website's donate button or opens a direct link that you've shared with them, the first page they will see asks the donor to select:
The type of gift they would like to make: one-time, monthly, or Round-Ups.
What amount they would like to donate, selecting one of your up to 4 suggested amounts or entering a custom dollar amount (if enabled).
Which campaign they would like to designate their gift toward.
Donors can also log into their existing donor account (if they have one), but this step is not required.*
If an Impact Amount has been paired with any of your up to 4 suggested amounts, then the impact amount will be displayed beneath the suggested amount when that donation amount has been selected.
Donors can also choose from any Campaigns that you've enabled in the giving form's settings. When a campaign is selected, the campaign's name and description will be displayed on the left side of the giving form.
After making their choice of donation type, amount, and campaign, a donor will then progress to the donation checkout.
On the left side of the page, the donor can also see which campaign they're donating to, their subtotal, the total amount of fees covered (if the cover fees box is checked), and their total donation amount.
Donors can make their donation in honor or memory of someone. When making a tribute donation, they will be asked to specify:
The acknowledgement delivery method (email or mailed letter)
If the gift is in honor or in memory
Who the recipient is (who you should send the acknowledgement to)
Where the acknowledgement letter should be sent (recipient's address or email address)
The message they would like included in the acknowledgement
The from name (who the donor wants the acknowledgement to say it's from)
Tribute details are found in your Tributes Report.
Donors can add a note/comment to their gift, and they can decide if their donation note is public or private. Donor notes/comments are found in your Notes Report.
On the right side of the page, the donor will be required to provide their first and last name, and their email address. Optionally, donors may provide their phone number and mailing address (unless you've set these as required fields).
Using the checkboxes at the bottom of the Contact Information section, donors can opt into receiving text messages and provide consent to allow your organization to subscribe them to your newsletters (news letters are not sent via Harness).
If you've added any custom fields to the giving form, those custom questions will display beneath the Contact Information section. Responses to custom questions are found in the downloadable Excel/CSV file of your Donations Report.
Lastly, a donor will enter their payment method information (or choose an existing payment method if logged in) and submit their donation.
After their donation has been submitted, the Thank You Page will be displayed.
* Donors are required to log into their existing donor account or create a new donor profile if they are creating a recurring gift (month or Round-Ups) or setting up ACH as their payment method. Learn more here.
What Payment Methods Can Be Used?
Your Harness fundraising pages allow donors to give using:
All major debit/credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover)
Apple Pay and Google Pay
Bank transfers, also known as ACH (learn more about ACH here)
Offline donations made via cash and checks may not be entered through your donor facing fundraising pages, but can be entered into Harness using the Add a Donation tool.
Because we partner exclusively with Stripe, donations using other payment methods such as Paypal and Venmo are not accepted. Other forms of donations such as in-kind and stock donations are also unable to be entered into Harness.
FAQs
Q: How do I connect a giving form with a campaign?
A: First, ensure the campaign is available within the giving form's settings under the General tab. Second, from your Campaigns, select Options > Edit > + Advanced Options > Choose your giving form from the drop-down list of options under Giving Forms > Save.
Q: Why isn't my floating donate button showing the giving form settings I have connected to a campaign?
A: Our floating donate button can only display one "view"/giving form at a time. It will always show your "default" giving form settings, but you can cause your floating donate button to "pop up" featuring a specific view/giving form via this guide.