New Donation Form and Fund Drive Branding

Summary: This report explains my role to improve the donation experience for visitors to the WordPress website for KKFI 90.1 FM, a Kansas City-based community radio station with a 60-mile radius listening range. 

My work included creating a custom Gravity Form integrated with PayPal for both one-time donations and recurring (monthly) donations, as well as a user's guide for the fundraising director. I also created a graphic design to support the October 4-14, 2012 on-air pledge drive, one of three annual drives, which brings in about 75% of the station's income. The design was used to build a "splash page" to use for the website, a slider image to post in the slider rotation on the site home page, a Facebook cover photo and landing page to allow fans to donate through the home page.

New Donation Form

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The development director at KKFI 90.1 FM sought to improve the donor experience on the new website by implementing a more user-friendly form, but more importantly, creating a donation form that receives monthly (sustaining) donations. See below for a diagram depicting the process flow.

The website developer selected Gravity Forms as the form tool on the website. Gravity Forms allows an administrator to build complex custom forms that meet business needs. In this case, KKFI wants to run all donations through PayPal payment processing. The station uses an Enhanced Recurring Payment (ERP) option from PayPal to receive recurring donations.

The form was fairly straightforward, but the donor is able to choose either "One-Time Donation" or "Sustaining (Monthly) Donation" options, which really means it's two forms. PayPal requires that a donation payment is either in the form of a Donation (one-time) or a Subscription (recurring), so I had to devise a form that displays the appropriate options and create "feeds" to send to PayPal.

There are two gifts for the one-time donations -- an official KKFI T-Shirt and a one-hour Guest DJ slot. Each gift is provided as a thank-you for donations of various amounts. A T-Shirt gift is provide for donations of (1) $90 and (2) between $90 and $149. Likewise, a Guest DJ slot is awarded for donations of (1) $150 and (2) between $150 and $199. Both gifts are provided for donations of $200 or more.

Each donation amount triggers an appropriate gift selection drop-down menu to display (see image below) For instance, if a donor selects the "Other Amount - Enter an amount $90-149" level then a field displays allowing them to enter a number and select a t-shirt size.



Additionally, pricing fields on a Gravity Form does not allow form administrators to check for the values within a range of values, say from $90 to $149, so I had to make PHP coding changes to validate the donation levels.

I developed a "Guide to Website Donation Payment Processing" to assist the KKFI development director understand donation payment processing on the website and its integration with PayPal.

Flow Diagram for Donation Processing

Click on image to view in full-size mode.

Fund Drive Graphic Design

The development director selected "A Rare Medium Done Well" slogan for the Fall 2012 Fund Drive. I styled the slogan and added the website colors with the rounded rectangle boxes and photos using Adobe Photoshop. The splash screen (see below) popped up the first time a website visitor viewed the site during the fund drive. The splash screen is common method to grab the attention of the website visitor. In this case, I used the Popover WordPress plugin which makes the job of creating flashy splash screens with little HTML code.