Creating custom Autofill links for a specific designation, amount, and/or adding special instructions is easy. The following is a tutorial on how to customize a link for main giving form for the University of Utah, “Give to The University of Utah“.
Step 1. Base link: https://donate.utah.edu/campaigns/53721/donations/new
Use the base link to get started. The base link is just the link to the main giving form. We will add the following snippets to the base link to customize it for more common uses, such as targeting a specific designation1, pre-filling an amount, and/or including special instructions.
Step 2. Adding Snippets
The following snippets added to the base link are color coded to help more easily distinguish the parts of the link which are referred to. The resulting links will work whether the color coding is present or not. I hope these instructions are clear and helpful. 🙂
Designation Code
Targeting a specific designation code such as AD22380-40165 for Sustainable Campus Development, which we’ll use in this example, is as easy as adding the snippet “?designation_id=AD22380-40165” to the end of the base link. Note (important!): the “?” is necessary after the base link to initiate the additional instruction. Without it, you will get an error and the link will not work.
The resulting link will be https://donate.utah.edu/campaigns/53721/donations/new?designation_id=AD22380-40165. Try it! When you click the link, you will see that the page will load with Sustainable Campus Development already selected in the “Designation” field.
Amount
Similar to the Designation Code snippet above, if you would like to autofill the Amount field with a specific amount, include the snippet “value=20” to pre-fill the Amount field with $20. Simply change the number “20” to the actual amount you’d like.
However, building upon the Designation Code snippet we created previously, we can also add a pre-filled amount in the link using the snippet “&value=20” to pre-fill the “Amount” field with $20. Again, simply change the number “20” to the actual amount you’d like. Note (important!) the “&” operator we added, the ampersand will connect the two additional pre-fill instructions we’re adding to the base link.
The resulting link will be https://donate.utah.edu/campaigns/53721/donations/new?designation_id=AD22380-40165&value=20. Try it! When you click the link, you will see that the page will load with Sustainable Campus Development already selected in the “Designation” field and the “Amount” field is pre-filled with 20.
Special Instructions
Similar to the Designation code and Amount snippets above, the “Special Instructions” field can be pre-filled by adding “?note=” to the base link or using “¬e=” with the ampersand, as seen previously, to connect with other instructions in the base link.
After the “=” you add whatever your note/special instructions are. For this example we’ll say “In honor of Professor Smith“. However (important!), without getting too technical; because these special instructions have spaces in between the words and URLs can’t contain spaces2, we need to add “%20” anywhere a space is present. Therefore, the snippet to add “In honor of Professor Smith” will look like this “In%20%20%20%20Smith“.
Building on the link that includes the Designation Code and Amount above, the resulting link will be https://donate.utah.edu/campaigns/53721/donations/new?designation_id=AD22380-40165&value=20¬e=In%20honor%20of%20Professor%20Smith. Try it! When you click the link, you will see that the page will load with Sustainable Campus Development already selected in the “Designation” field, the “Amount” field is pre-filled with $20, and the “Special Instructions” field contains “In honor of Professor Smith”.
Step 3. Create Your Link
As seen in Step 2, there are several common snippets you can use as modifiers to create a custom autofill link yourself with little to no additional assistance from the AG team.
There are additional modifiers and more specific links that can be created similarly such as tracking links for advocacy and whatnot, but those are more complex and do require more assistance from the AG team.
As always, for any questions or further assistance, please contact Jorge Pille via Teams or email.
- The designation must already be loaded in GiveCampus, if your link is not working, it may not be loaded or the link is not set up properly. Contact the AG team for assistance if needed. ↩︎
- Learn more about URL encoding here. ↩︎