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      1. Resources and Documentation
      2. Organization

      Getting Started With iDonate

      Starting From Square One

      What Does iDonate Do?

      iDonate makes digital fundraising easy, for both your donors and your organization.  Your donors will love the smooth and secure transaction process, and your organization will be able to use the data from these transactions to make data-driven decisions, not to mention the increased revenue from recurring gifts.

      How Do I Get Started?

      After your organization is onboarded, there are just a few steps to opening the connection between your organization and your donors.

      1. Create a Designation: What is the donation for?  General need or specific?
      2. Create a Campaign: The overall initiative, e.g. 2023 Food Drive.
      3. Create a Giving Form: The avenue by which the donor gives their gift.
      4. Create a Hosted Page: No website?  No problem!  iDonate Hosted Pages let you build a basic website without ever leaving the app.

      Step One: Create a Designation

      The first thing you'll need to do is create a Designation, which is the means by which you communicate where the donation is going, in order to remain compliant with 501(c)(3) regulations.

      A full walkthrough of creating and editing designations can be found here.

      Step Two: Create a Campaign

      The Campaign can be thought of as the main banner under which all fundraising efforts take place.  A campaign can contain any number of the four Giving Channels:

      A full walkthrough of campaign creation can be found here.

      Step Three: Create a Giving Form

      There are four Giving Channels, but the Giving Form stands out as the most efficient way to start receiving donations.

      Giving Forms are a wonderful thing.  You can use a template and have one up and running in minutes, then you can further customize it to drive conversions.  You can use Custom CSS to further stylize your Giving Form.  As if that weren't cool enough, organizations can even A/B Test customizations, leading to higher and higher rates of conversion.

      The full walkthrough of creating your Giving Form can be found here.

      Once your Giving Form is published, all there is to do is place the Code Snippet on your page, and you are ready to receive donations.

      Step Four (Optional): Create a Hosted Page

      If web hosting is unavailable, you can use the Hosted Page to create a basic web page that has  your Giving Form as the focal element, which is then hosted on iDonate's servers.  An example of a Hosted Page can be seen here.

      Step Five: Optimize and Explore

      Now that you've created your first fundraising system using iDonate, you're ready to start the journey of optimization.  This can mean many things.  Some examples:

      • Customizing Giving Forms with branded colors, imagery, copy, etc.
      • Using Reporting to gather insights on donor demographics.
      • Running A/B Tests to determine what sort of elements, imagery, or wording result in a higher conversion rate.
      • Setting up Integrations and Webhooks to communicate with other services, such as Salesforce or MailChimp, that you may have in your organization's software ecosystem.