How to Create a Recurring Donation Form

Recurring donation form

FormSmarts has long supported one-time donations as part of a dedicated donation form, together with other fees on a registration form, or even on a form using our SuperCart shopping cart.

We are pleased to announce that FormSmarts now also supports recurring donations. A recurring donation allows a contributor to sign up for a donation plan to give the same amount at regular intervals, typically every month or year.

Creating a Recurring Donation Form

  • Add a text box with the field name formatted as My Donation ($ USD/month)
  • Set the field’s Allowed Content (aka. data type) to Number
  • In the Form Details screen of the form builder, set the On Submission option to Integrate with PayPal using advanced integration.

FormSmarts supports the following variations:

Recurring Period

  • Cause Description ($ USD/month)
  • Cause Description ($ USD/2 weeks)
  • options: day(s), week(s), month(s), year(s)

Recurring Times

  • Cause Description (12 x $ USD/month)
  • Think of Recurring Times (12 in this case) as a number of installments
  • If Recurring Times is not specified, the recurring donation runs until it is canceled

Contribution to Multiple Causes

As illustrated on the screenshot above and in this demo, you may add multiple donation boxes to a form to give contributors the opportunity to choose the causes they wish to donate to and allow them to contribute to several causes in a single donation. In the example above, the donor is signing up to give a total of $300 each month; with $200 to support Project A and $100 going towards Projects B.

When several donation boxes are added to a form, all of them must have the same Recurring Period and Recurring Times.

Introducing the New SuperCart Shopping Cart

We’ve completely redesigned the user interface of our SuperCart shopping cart to provide a more refined and intuitive user experience.

SuperCart: form with a minimized view of the shopping cart
Minimized view of the shopping cart

What Is SuperCart?

SuperCart is FormSmarts’ shopping cart.

SuperCart allows a user to submit multiple payment forms — each with one or more priced items on it — and pay for all of them at the end.

A typical use case for SuperCart is to allow a customer to register an open-ended number of guests for an event:

  1. The customer first enters the information of the first participant and chooses the relevant registration options.
  2. Once the customer has submitted the form, all fees and priced options are listed in the shopping cart. In the example below, the registration options for the first guest include two fees: Standard Registration and Lunch & Dinner.
  3. The customer is presented with two choices on the confirmation page: Continue Shopping or Proceed to Payment
  4. He can submit the form again as many time as needed to register more participants
  5. Once done, he can pay for all registrations
SuperCart: form with an expanded view of the shopping cart
Expanded view of the shopping cart

Please try our SuperCart demo and give us feedback.

How to Create a SuperCart Form

Building a SuperCart form is easy:

  1. Create a form with fees formatted like on any FormSmarts payment form.
  2. Set the Return URL of the form to the FormSmarts.com URL given by the form builder. If you prefer to embed the form onto your site (which we don’t recommend with SuperCart), use instead the URL of the page where the form is embedded.
  3. In the Form Details screen of the form builder, set the On Submission option to Integrate with PayPal using SuperCart.

If you haven’t already done so, remember to set up your PayPal account for payment integration.

Advanced Use Cases

Multiple Forms

Most users set up SuperCart to allow their customers to submit one specific form (e.g. registration form for event A) multiple times to register multiple participants, as presented in the scenario above.

SuperCart however allows different forms within the same cart. This would allow, for example, members of an organization to:

  • Buy or renew their membership
  • then register for a first event
  • then register for a second event
  • then pay for the total amount.

And of course, what works for one member works for several…

Donations

SuperCart also supports donations.

Discounts

Flat discounts and discount codes are supported, but percentage discounts are not.

Notes

The new shopping cart is only available with the latest generation of FormSmarts forms. If you’re still using an older version, please update your site now.

Give Feedback

Please share your thoughts and feedback about the shopping cart. Post a comment or let us know on Twitter @FormSmarts or Facebook.

New Form Design

We’ve updated the design of our forms. The new forms provide a superior user experience on all devices; mobile, desktop and smart TV.

New online form design

How Can I Start Using the New Form Version?

If you’ve joined FormSmarts since March 1, 2016, you are most likely already using the new version. Otherwise you need to migrate your forms to the new version:

  • Visit the Settings Tab of the Form Builder and set Form Version to Current
  • Copy the new embed code snippet and update your site
  • If you’re using standalone forms, use the new FormSmarts.com URL provided.

What Do You Think About the New Form Design?

Please share your thoughts and feedback about the new form design. Write a comment to this blog post or let us know on Twitter @FormSmarts or Facebook.

Introducing Private Forms

Many FormSmarts members use our online forms within their organization, team or with external collaborators. With Private Forms, customers can now restrict who can submit a form to authorized users and identify the person who submitted each form entry.

Private Form

Unlike other FormSmarts forms, a Private Form:

  • can only be accessed and submitted by a user attached to the form owner’s account (find out how to add users to your FormSmarts account)
  • each form entry is associated with the user who submitted it, who’s username is displayed in the email notification, PDF, online and Excel report.

Use a private form in any situations where you need to temporarily or permanently limit who can submit a form:

  • To support internal processes within your organization
  • To associate each form response with the identity of the person who submitted it
  • To allow onsite or private registrations for a registration form once public registrations for an event are closed.

Please try out this demo with the following login info:

  • Account Alias: formsmarts_demo
  • Email: demo@syronex.com
  • Password: <5RUh02K

To make a form Private, sign in to the API Console and submit a request to the Form API.

How to Add a Waiver, Liability Release or Other Contractual Agreement to a Form

The Agreement form widget allows you to add a waiver, liability release, agreement, or any other contract (terms & conditions, privacy statement, policy) to a form.

Add a liability release, waiver or digital contract to a form

The Agreement widget is intended to be combined with a required checkbox and an e-signature to capture a person’s consent on an online registration form or any other digital contract. Please try this demo.

  • A user can read the agreement inline in a scrollable area
  • The text can be popped out to a larger window and even launched full screen
  • We provide print and download buttons in the pop-up window
  • The text shown in agreement widget allows links and basic formatting: bold, italics, underlining, ordered and unordered lists. Here is a waiver example with formatted text.
  • Agreements are currently limited to 20,000 characters, please contact us if you need more.

Agreements are only available with the new generation of FormSmarts forms. You can set your account to the new forms in the Settings tab of the Form Builder.

Introducing Form Routing Policies

As part of FormSmarts collaboration features, we’re introducing Routing Policies. Routing policies (or routing rules) allow you to change the destination email address of a form each time it is submitted, depending on certain criteria.

Until recently the only option was for each email subscriber to receive a copy of the notification message when a form is submitted. FormSmarts now also supports alternative behaviors.

User-Selected Recipient

With User-Selected Recipient, users select to whom the form response is sent from a list on the form.

For example, a company might want to allow its customers to submit both sales and customer support inquires online. Customers should be able to choose on the form whether their inquiry is sent to the sales or customer support department.

User-Selected Recipient: Online form recipient is selected by the user on the form

Round-Robin

With Round-Robin, form entries are sent to email subscribers in turn, thus automatically sharing the workload between collaborators in a team.

In the example below, four customers are submitting the same online form. The form was set up for round-robin routing between two colleagues, Clare and David. The first time the form is submitted it’s sent to Clare, the second time it’s sent to David, then to Clare again, then to David again, and so on.

Round-Robin: Share the workload of responding to online inquiries between collaborators

Conditional Notification

A Conditional Notification rule allows you to choose whether to send an email notification based on the value of input fields or other conditions on the answer the user provides on a form.

This lets you filter form responses, sending only those that meet the conditions you've specified to someone in your team, while all responses (even those that were filtered out) are still available online and in Excel spreadsheets.

An example use of Conditional Notification during the COVID-19 pandemic is to make an employee screening questionnaire.

Setting Up a Form’s Routing Policy

This short video shows how to set up a routing policy.

To set up a routing rule:

  1. Visit the Forms Tab of the form builder and click on the icon showing a pen corresponding to the form you would like to edit
  2. In the drop-down list under Form Subscribers, check all email addresses that you would like to take part in the routing policy (participants)
  3. Save changes
  4. Click Change email routing policy and select the relevant policy
  5. Save changes

Checkbox List vs. Checkbox

The form builder provides both standard checkboxes and a dedicated checkbox list widget. Let’s review when you should use one or the other.

Checkbox List

As illustrated below, a checkbox list is made of a question (field name in the form builder) and a number of checkboxes. Use a checkbox list whenever multiple choices are allowed in a list of items, as often occurs in online surveys and many other types of forms.

Checkbox List widget in the Form Builder

Checkbox

When you only need a single yes/no answer, a simple checkbox is all you need. For example, the field Subscribe to FormSmarts Demo mailing list on this mail list signup form uses a checkbox rather than a checkbox list to allow the user to subscribe to the mailing list.

Required Checkbox for Disclaimers & Waivers

Use a required (non-optional) checkbox whenever the form must have a disclaimer/waiver area where the person must “check” that they “agree to” before the form will allow for success submission. The checkbox text supports links and basic formatting.

Required check-box in the Form Builder

How to Organize Your Forms in the Form Builder

As the year ends, we’ve updated the form builder to improve how users can organize their forms.

Form Filter Drop-Down in the Forms Tab of the Form Builder

  • Forms can now be classified into categories. You can set a category both when creating a new form and editing existing forms.
  • A new function allows customers to filter forms shown in the Forms Tab of the form builder by category or enabled/disabled status.

We know those FormSmarts members who have created a number of forms along the years will appreciate this new feature. As always, we would very much appreciate your thoughts and feedback.

Happy holidays from the FormSmarts Team. We wish you a wonderful upcoming 2015.

Introducing Multi-User Accounts

FormSmarts supports accounts with multiple users, allowing an account owner to give invited users access to selected online forms.

Multiuser accounts with FormSmarts online form builder

How to Enable Multiple User Accounts

  1. Set up an account alias
  2. Create users
  3. Manage user permissions

Set Up an Account Alias

Before allowing sub-users to sign in to FormSmarts, you first need to set up an alias for your account. The alias must be unique and easy for users to memorize. A good choice is probably your organization or department’s name. Users will need to enter the account alias on the log in screen.

To create an account alias, visit the Account Overview panel of your account.

Create a User

To create a user, head to the User Management Dashboard.

  • Users sign in to FormSmarts with their email address, account alias and password
  • Before creating a user, add their email address to your account in the Settings Tab of the Form Builder and verify it
  • Users can change their password in the Security Settings panel of their account if they know their current password
  • The account administrator can reset a user’s password in the User Management Dashboard.

Manage User Permissions

For each form, you can grant a user permissions to:

  • access individual form entries online or download a PDF (e.g. from the link in email notifications)
  • download form attachments (file uploads)
  • generate Excel reports
  • add tags and notes to a form entry
  • edit or delete a form entry

You can also give a user account-level permissions to:

  • renew your subscription or upgrade your account (billing permissions)

To set account-level permissions, please contact Support.

How to Sign In as an Invited User

We’ve updated the log in screen to allow all FormSmarts members to sign in on the same page. Account owners (aka account admins) can sign in in the usual way with their email address and password. Invited users also need to enter the account alias provided by their account admin as shown in this video.

Multiple users are available with our Business Plus package and above.

PayPal Integration: Improved Donations & Discounts

We started the new year with a number of updates to FormSmarts’ Advanced PayPal Integration.

Mix Donations & Regular Payments

FormSmarts now allows you to accept both payments for a fixed amount (e.g. membership renewal, registration fee) and donations (which amount is chosen by the contributor) on the same form. This feature is typically aimed at non-profits that would like to collect contributions on their membership form or when taking online registrations for an event. Feel free to try this demo.

Add a Promotion Code and Discount to PayPal

More Flexible Discount Codes

A discount code can now cover the whole amount of the transaction. This would come useful on an event registration form: some attendees to whom you have given an offer code will be able to register for free, while the bulk of delegates will have to pay.

SuperCart Update

In line with this change, we’ve also updated SuperCart to allow free registrations (or any other type of transactions) as part of a SuperCart session. So non-paying delegates can be registered at the same time as paying delegates, within a single SuperCart session.

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About the Form Builder Blog

The Online Form Builder Blog is published by FormSmarts, a web form service providing all you need to create a form and publish it online in minutes. FormSmarts makes it easy to build a form and embed it on your site. You can then get form submissions by email or store them on FormSmarts and download an Excel report. Learn more about the many other benefits of FormSmarts.