Donor Management was created with some standard fields that are common to most donors (i.e. contact details, date of birth, gender) and donations (i.e. amount, date, payment method).  

However, there are times when you may need the ability to track a piece of information that is specific to your organization. You can track this information internally through our "custom fields," which can be found on either contact records or donation records (depending on what information you're collecting!).

You can also ask "custom questions" on your Everyday Giving Pages, and let the donor provide you with responses at the time that they make a donation. Those custom questions can then, in turn, be used as custom fields in Donor Management, and help track that information that you've collected about your donor.

Additionally, some fields of information within Donor Management can be used as "merge fields," which allow you to further personalize your communications by including individualized details about each donor. These fields let you add certain information, like a donor's name, directly into the messages that they receive from your organization.

A custom field is a field that you can create that doesn't already exist within Donor Management that you'd like to be able to track and use for more accurate outreach, personalization, and segmentation.

Custom fields are typically used to track meaningful information that's outside of the typical "by the numbers" information being captured. Common custom fields can include:

To create a custom field, you'll want to click on the "Settings" button in the left-hand navigation of Donor Management. You then should be able to select "Custom Fields" from the available dropdown options.
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You'll then want to choose either a "contact" custom field, or a "giving" custom field.

Contact custom fields appear on each contact record directly, and are most commonly used to track information about a specific donor - like motivation or volunteer status.

Giving custom fields appear on each donation record, and are most commonly used to track information about certain donations - such as if a certain board member was indirectly responsible for that donation.

Not seeing the option to select "Settings" or "Custom Fields?" You might not have the correct admin level to access that part of Donor Management. You can learn more about the various admin account levels here.

A custom question is a question that you can create directly in Fundraising Pages and then place on an Everyday Giving Page for your donors to answer during the checkout process.

​Questions will be asked in a second step of the donation checkout process, after the donor has selected an amount (and any other required fields on that page).

When you create a new custom question for your Everyday Giving pages, it also will create a corresponding custom field on each donation record in Donor Management. You can then view the responses on the donation record in Donor Management.

You can also filter on your custom fields on both the "Contacts" and "Giving" pages, and custom fields can be included in any data exports you perform. This means you can filter for a specific response (or any responses) to those custom questions in Donor Management as well.

If you created a new custom question from your Everyday Giving page, and you prefer it to be attached to the contact record and not the donation, you can update that directly in Donor Management.

From the Dashboard, you'll want to click on the "Settings" option in the left-hand navigation options, and select "Custom Fields" from the dropdown options that appear.

You'll then be able to edit the custom field that corresponds to your custom question directly from this page. There should be an option available to change a "giving" custom field to a "contact" custom field.

Please note that if you make this change to a custom field after responses have been collected, Donor Management will take the response from the most recent donation and move that response to the associated contact record instead.

If you've already set up custom fields on your contact or donation records in Donor Management, you have the ability to use any of those fields on your Everyday Giving Page as well.

We recommend first making sure that the custom field's name is "donor friendly" - if not, you can edit the field and change the "Question Label" to whatever question you're looking to ask your donors. You should then be able to locate that corresponding custom question on your Everyday Giving pages.

Additionally, the "Internal Nickname" will be used on the contact record or donor record and in any of your filtering or reporting from Donor Management, so be mindful of this when trying to locate or compare responses.

We’ve mentioned using “merge fields” in your acknowledgements to customize and personalize your messages to donors – but what exactly are they, and how can you use them?

Merge fields are certain text “codes” that, when inserted into the text of your communications, will automatically be replaced by specific information that’s unique to a donor, or donation.

For example, the merge field “First name” added to an email communication would automatically add your donor’s first name in place of that merge field. That way, the letter is addressed directly to the donor without having to type each detail out individually.

When editing your acknowledgements, you should see a “Merge Fields” button included within the text editing options.

If you click on that button, you should see a drop-down list of all the available merge fields you can add to your message.

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Just click so your cursor is blinking in the space where you’d like to insert the merge field. Then, click on the “Merge Fields” button and select the correct merge field – it'll automatically be added to the text.

Once added to your document, a merge field will look like this within your text:

*|NAME_OF_FIELD|*

If you were to use a merge field in a sentence, it would look something like this in your draft:

Dear *|FIRST_NAME|* ,

Thank you for your donation amount of *|LAST_DONATION_AMOUNT|* ON *LAST_DONATED_AT|* .

You’ll want to be sure that there is at least one space between the merge field and any other words or punctuation – otherwise, the merge field won’t work correctly.

Once you click “Save” in your acknowledgement, you should immediately see what information is being pulled in by each merge field. (If not, you can always download a PDF copy, or send yourself a test email to see how the merge fields will be used.)

Some merge fields are only available in certain communication tools, and may not be available within others.

For example, "donation date" or "donation amount" are only available in individual acknowledgement-style communications; they aren't available as options within email blasts.

That depends on what merge field you're trying to use. In most cases, it'll simply be left blank if there's nothing listed in the individual contact's field.

However, there are some special circumstances that substitute certain details in, when necessary. These include: