Premium donation – step-by-step

You use a ‘Premium Donation page’ when you want to build a page that allows your supporters to make donations to your organization. 

‘Premium donation pages’ operate in the same way as standard donation pages, but have added functionality to incentivise the donor to give a higher gift by offering them a product such as a tshirt.

Additional set-up is required compared to standard donation pages, including creating the available products in the software, and adding the premium gift block and shipping block. We’ll go through all these in this step-by-step guide

Before you start…

Premium donation pages are set up in a similar way to a standard Donation page. You can use the same gateway(s) for both types of pages. 

Before creating your first Premium Donation page, you should:

• ensure your Gateways are set-up and working correctly and that you have the relevant donation fields set up in your supporter record

• create the product(s) that you want to use as incentives under Pages > Components > Product Management (click here for more)

• add tagged shipping fields to your Account Data Structure if they aren’t there already, so the Shipping Block will work on your page. These fields should include “Shipping Enabled”, which is used to determine whether the shipping address is different to the donor’s address. There are then extra ones to hold shipping name and addresses. Click here for more on the shipping block

Create your page

To create a new premium donation page, you can either duplicate an existing page or create a new one from scratch.

To create a brand new page, click “New Page”. You will be shown a variety of different pages you can make:

Open

Click on “Premium donation” and click Next. You will be taken to the settings page which you can read about on the next step.

Duplicating an existing page instead

Alternatively you can duplicate an existing page you have previously created. To do this, go to your list of pages (by clicking on Page Builder in the menu) and next to the one you wish to duplicate, click the Copy button under the “Dup” column.

Update the page settings

You can also access this screen later on from within page builder by clicking the cog icon.

The following fields can be completed:

• Name: This is the reference name of your page for your own purposes (the supporter won’t see this). It is a good idea to come up with a naming convention so you can keep track of your campaigns, which is especially useful when using the query builder. For example, “2017 Save the Earth Donation Page”

• Public title: This field is the public name of your page. You can reveal this by using page tags.

• Status: By default, pages are “New” until you are ready to launch them. New means that the live URL is not available until you set the status to “Live”. You can also close pages here.

• Base URL: The Base URL is the first part of the address of your page. By default this is https://us.engagingnetworks.app or https://ca.engagingnetworks.app, but you can read more here about where to set your default base URLs, and here for more about changing the Base URL to something more familiar to your supporters.

• Notes: Any notes you want to add, type in here. This is for internal use and isn’t visible to supporters.

• Closed landing page and Error landing page: read more here.

• Address lookup: US Only – this allows you to validate addresses using postal code mapping. 

• Language: You can optionally add the ability to have different locales for your page, so that text blocks, forms and so on show different versions depending on the browser language. 

• Template: The template determines how your page looks – the header and footer, as well as fonts, colours and so on. For more about templates, click here.

• Attributes: You can optionally categorize your page according to Attributes.

Once you click next, you can optionally set notification settings which will can send you an email when a supporter completes the page. Click ‘Save’ and the admin screen will close, showing you the page-builder itself.

Donation settings

This screen allows you to choose your payment gateway(s). Using the gateway dropdown, choose your primary gateway.

Open

If you would like to add additional gateways, click “I would like to add addtional gateways…”. You will need to choose the gateway and the condition under which it should be used. Example: Currency = USD.

The editor

Once you have completed your notification settings, you will be taken to a page editor which allows you to add content such as text and form fields to your campaign.

This editor is “WYSIWYG”, and shows how your page will look once it is live, allowing you edit the page by dragging in components, and hovering over them to edit them or move them around.

Pages

Note that you are on “Page 1” initially. You can have several pages, allowing the supporter to move through the premium donation page step-by-step. You can navigate between pages using the “Page 1, Page 2” buttons at the top. To add more pages, click the “+” button next to those buttons. 

When you add new pages, you have a choice of adding a standard page, or to link to another campaign (pre-populating any fields) or a redirection to your website:

Rows

Rows hold the content of your page, and can be one or two column. You can only drag components into “rows”, shown as a white box with a dotted border in the screenshot above. For more about rows, click here. 

The toolbar

By hovering over the toolbar icon on the right you have access to the types of content you can add.  For more about the toolbar, click here.

Components

To add the  content of your page, you use the right-hand toolbar to drag components such as text and form blocks into your page. A common component is the “text block”, for example, which allows you to add formatted text to your page, and a “form block” that allows you to add form fields and questions, such as email address or an opt-in checkbox, as well as the submit button. For more about components, click here. 

Premium pages need the Premium gift block and Shipping block.

Note that donation pages require certain fields within a form block, such as Donation Amount, to work. Which fields are required depends on the gateway you have. You can spread these fields over several pages – see the next step for a suggested structure.

Also consider whether you wish to add an automated thank you email – to do this, go to auto responders in the toolbar. More here.

Save, save, save…

Remember to continually Save your page as you add components and edit them. You can lose your amendments if you close your browser tab or the editor itself without saving.

Add the content of your pages

A common set-up for premium donation pages is as below – just drag in the appropriate blocks and set their content up, saving as you go:

Page 1

• Two-column row

• Left column – a Text block explaining what the donation page is about

• Right column – a Form block with fields for the supporter to add their name and address, including an opt-in question and button. You could include the donation amount here too

Page 2

• Two-column row

• Left column – a text block explaining you need to collect their donation details, and any policies or alternative ways to donate you may have

• Right column – a Form block with the necessary donation fields, such as payment type, card name, card number, cvv, expiry date (these will depend on the gateway you use – see the documentation on your gateway for more information), and a button to submit the payment. You may also want to include a gift aid field here as well.

• Right column – a Premium Gift block (click here for more information) which displays the incentive item if certain donation criteria are met

• Right column – a Shipping block (click here for more information) which displays additional name and address fields if the gift should be shipped elsewhere

Page 3

• One-column row

• Text block saying thanks to the supporter

• Social share buttons

Test and launch your premium donation page!

Test your pages

Click the orange “Done” button to validate the page once you have saved the page and are ready to test it. This button reports on any missing elements, and reminds you about other things you may want to think about.

You can view the page as if it were live by clicking the magnifying glass (Preview button). The page is shown in a new tab in “DEMO” mode (which you can confirm by viewing the URL – it will end with “?mode=DEMO”). If you have created versions for different locales or profiles, you will be able to view them via the preview button too.

When the page is in demo mode, it means you can make test donations to verify that the form is set up properly to process. In this way you can confirm that the page is working for your gateway.

Make it live

Once you are happy it is working correctly, you can change the status from New to Live. To do this, click the cog icon to access page Settings and change Status from New to Live, then click Save.

In the page-builder list of pages, you can then click on the name of your page to view the Live URL. 

Under “Published URLs” you can see the URL of your page. Click “Add tracking” to add different versions of this URL for use on other channels, such as your website, in emails, or on Facebook. Then you can easily see how people come to see your page.

Once it has been running for a while, you can click “View quick report” to see how your action is doing, or look at the visual reporting for more details.