Tweaks and Tucks: Recent Enhancements to DonorDrive

By Dan Volkens,  Senior Interactive Designer

While our team continually challenges DonorDrive for improvement, it’s our users who provide us with real world feedback. We’re actively working on many suggestions and improvements, but I’d like to highlight a few that we’ve completed and rolled out recently:

• Ditch the Salutation Field
• Support Youtube, Flickr, and Website Links on Fundraising Pages
• Provide an Event Summary Printout

Ditch the Salutation Field

Very early in DonorDrive’s planning, we debated internally to include salutation as a required field in the registration form, both as a courtesy to registrants and as a valuable piece of demographic information to organizations. As it turns out, this field proved to be a roadblock to registration rather than to add value.

• Registrants questioned its necessity in being required, let alone asked for.
• Many users register for more than one person, I.E. a couple, a family, etc., even though the DonorDrive system supports a single user per registration. In this case, the standard salutations of Mr. Mrs. Ms. don’t apply.

Users have asked us to remove this unnecessary field. We agreed. The salutation field has been removed from the registration process on all DonorDrive websites.

Support Youtube, Flickr, and Website Links on Fundraising Pages

Initially the personal and team fundraising pages were very well received. But with the explosion of social media, request upon request was made for Youtube and Flickr support, as well as the ability to link out to a few favorite websites. We set out to integrate those capabilities as soon as possible.

Participants and teams can now add videos, photo slideshows and three website links to their fundraising pages with a simple copy and paste. Just grab the embed code from Youtube or Flickr and paste into your fundraising page edit form.

Provide an Event Summary Printout

Many Organizations require a participant to bring some sort of handout or registration/donations printout to the event, whether it be for tracking purposes, final registration, fundraising tracking, etc. So we integrated a simple Event Summary printout under the participant’s donations details in the My Account area.

Event Summary details:

• Participant’s first and last name
• Verified total funds raised
• Unverified cash & check funds raised
• Team information (if part of a team)
• Event information
• Waiver with signature line and date (if required by the organization)

That wraps it up for now. We have many more enhancements either on the table or already in development. We’ll keep you updated on our progress!