Giving Forms and URL Parameters

Dynamically populate your Giving Form.

URL parameters are a great way to personalize the content displayed on a web page, or, in this case, a Giving Form.

For example, say you have a donor accessing one of your organization's pages that is geared toward a demographic in Pennsylvania.  By including a URL parameter in the link to the Giving Form, the Giving Form would then show Pennsylvania as the selected State, instead of requiring the donor to select a state.

Example of URL Parameters

The following would pre-populate a Giving Form with:

• State: New York
• City: New York

https://www.example.com/giving-form?state=NY&city=New%20York

The basics of it are that you begin the parameter statement with a ? at the end of the URL, i.e. the page name, then separate each subsequent parameter with an &.

Available Parameters

Important: Characters such as blank space, periods, and other punctuation will not be read by the URL parser unless formatted in a specific way.  For example, white space becomes %20, and a period becomes %2E.  For a full list of UTF-8 encoding, please refer to this helpful article from W3Schools.

Advanced Parameters

Most of the parameters listed above do not require much formatting.  However, there are a few that require some specific formatting.

Before we begin, something that will save you a lot of time configuring these parameters is this super-useful Chrome console command:

encodeURIComponent('your unformatted parameter goes here');

This will return a valid URL parameter.  For example, the above command would output this:

your%20unformatted%20parameter%20goes%20here

Now then, on to the fun stuff.

Frequency and Frequency Options

These are the allowed values for the Frequency (or Frequency Options) of the gift:

• "Once"
• "Weekly"
• "1st and 15th"
• "Every 2 Weeks"
• "Monthly"
• "Quarterly"
• "Semi-Annually"
• "Annually"

Unformatted, the Frequency Options parameter would appear as an array of Strings:

frequency_options=["once","monthly","annually"]

That, when formatted, reads as follows:

frequency_options=%5B%22once%22%2C%22monthly%22%2C%22annually%22%5D

For single frequency, a URL parameter would read as follows:

frequency=monthly

Gift Arrays

Unformatted/Non-Encoded:

gift_arrays=[11,12]

Formatted/Encoded:

gift_arrays=%5B11%2C12%5D

Designations (Multiple)

Unformatted/Non-Encoded:

designations=[ 
   {"id": "2736a9f5-0255-a196-a36b-0366637bdd44", "amount": 10},
   {"id": "d61bf66b-7c01-d566-bf0e-058ac5cb0afa", "amount": 15}
]

Formatted/Encoded (some scrolling required):

designations=[{"id"%3A"2736a9f5-0255-a196-a36b-0366637bdd44"%2C"amount"%3A10}%2C{"id"%3A"d61bf66b-7c01-d566-bf0e-058ac5cb0afa"%2C"amount"%3A15}]

Customer Meta

Non-Encoded, as a JSON object:

customer_meta = { 
    "META_1": "meta-value-here", 
    "META_2": "the-other-meta-value",
    "META-4": "where did meta 3 go?"
}

To properly encode this parameter, you must use a different method than described above:

var yourCustomerMeta = encodeURIComponent(
    JSON.stringify(
        customer_meta = { 
            "META_1": "meta-value-here", 
            "META_2": "the-other-meta-value",
            "META-4": "where did meta 3 go?"
        }
    )
);

Which will then result in an encoded value:

'%7B%22META_1%22%3A%22meta-value-here%22%2C%22META_2%22%3A%22the-other-meta-value%22%2C%22META-4%22%3A%22where%20did%20meta%203%20go%3F%22%7D'

Corporate Matched Employer

This is a Unique ID sourced from Double the Donation that corresponds with the company that will match the gift being made.

Custom Field Default Value

This parameter will set the default value for a Custom Field.  For a Text Input Custom Field, the value can be whatever you want, but for selection Custom Fields, e.g. Drop-down, Multiple Choice, the value must be included in the list.

Example

Say we have a drop-down Custom Field named "Dropdown Test Eight", and it has a value we want to select, named "Option D".  You would set this parameter like so:

[your-page-url]?Dropdown%20Test%20Eight*=Option%20D

Notice the required asterisk after the name of the Custom Field.