The tools in Qgiv’s Text Fundraising package offer some really great ways for donors to quickly and easily make a Text-to-Donate gift to your organization while on the go, at an event, or from the comfort of their living room!
By combining the Text Fundraising package with Peer-to-Peer, you can supercharge your campaigns and raise even more for your organization.
Your donors simply text a unique keyword (that you set right in your control panel!) to your Text-to-Donate number (50155) and receive a link to your peer-to-peer campaign’s donation form. You can also customize and automatically send out handy reminder messages to encourage completion of pledged gifts!
Peer-to-peer participants and teams can even create their own keywords to send to their supporters.
Please note: Text-to-Donate requires the Text Fundraising or Giving+ package in addition to the Peer-to-Peer package. To learn how to add a package to your Qgiv account, check out this article.
Contents:
- Tips for Creating Keywords
- Text Messaging Compliance
- Checking Your Keywords
- Setting Up a Campaign
- Text-to-Donate Table
- How Donors Use Keywords
- Text-to-Donate for Participants and Teams
Tips for Creating Keywords
When creating your text-to-donate SMS keywords, it's important to remember the following:
- Acronyms and single words work best, especially if they're specific to your organization/event
- Spaces are not supported
- Keywords should be tested with autocorrect to make sure they don't get changed to something else
- Special characters are not supported
Check out this handy PDF checklist to make sure your text-to-donate campaign is configured just right: Text-to-Donate Checklist.
Text Messaging Compliance
When marketing your text-to-donate campaign, be sure to remain compliant and include information about your campaign, how often donors can expect to receive messages, and that you'll be using Qgiv!
Here's an example of how to phrase your messaging to ensure it's compliant:
Text [your keyword] to 50155 to donate to [your organization name]. Message frequency may vary. Message and data rates may apply. Reply HELP for help or STOP to cancel. Text Fundraising powered by Qgiv. Terms of Service <https://www.qgiv.com/terms-of-service>
Checking Your Keywords
You can confirm which keyword you're using by navigating to your Campaign Settings and scrolling down to the Text-to-Donate Keywords area.
Did you know you can also have donors opt in to receive text communications, which means you can send them outbound text message campaigns? You can read more about our outbound messaging tools here.
You can also read this Help Desk article to learn how to link your Text-to-Donate campaign to FundHub Live so you can cast your donations on the big screen at an event!
Please note: There is a 10-item limit on how many Text-to-Donate keywords/campaigns you can have per peer-to-peer form.
Setting Up a Campaign
To set up a Text-to-Donate campaign and configure pledge reminder messages, click the Text-To-Donate link in your peer-to-peer form’s control panel.
This will display your existing Text-to-Donate campaigns. If you haven’t created a campaign yet, you can click either Add New Text Campaign next to Text-to-Donate or “create one now” inside the white box below Text-to-Donate.
General Settings
First, name the campaign and add an optional description.
Next, enter your campaign Keyword. Need help coming up with a keyword? Check out the tips at the beginning of this article!
If you’d like the campaign to have start/end dates, turn on the toggle. Dates are used when you want to accept gifts for a specific period of time. Otherwise, leave the toggle turned off.
The start and end dates are particularly handy if you're running a time-sensitive campaign and using the FundHub Live feature to cast your campaign thermometer at an event! Want to learn how to set up FundHub Live? Head to this Help Desk article.
Turn on the next toggle to require a donation amount when texting the campaign. When enabled, donors must specify a donation amount when texting your keyword. To learn more about how donors use text-to-donate, check out this article.
Next, you can review the content for the Inactive Campaign, Complete Your Gift, After Donation, and Reminder messages. These are text messages automatically sent under specific conditions.
Inactive Campaign Message
The first is the Inactive Campaign Message. This will send a message telling supporters that the campaign to which they’re trying to donate is not yet active. For example, if your campaign is not yet active on the form or if a donor sends a message to the associated keyword outside of the dates you specified, they would receive your customized message as a response.
Complete Your Gift Message
The second is the Complete Your Gift Message, which thanks supporters for submitting their pledge. You can use this message to insert the URL to your form and encourage the donor to fulfill an incomplete pledged donation. We use an automatic URL shortener to shorten the length of the form URL your donor receives via text. It will always start with qgiv.us/ in the received text message.
After Donation Message
The third is the After Donation Message, which is sent when your donor completes a Text-to-Donate gift. This is a great place to include a call-to-action to visit your website or to have donors share the campaign with friends!
Reminder Messages
To encourage supporters to complete their pledges if they don’t complete the donation right away, you can create a series of Reminder Messages to send automatically.
The campaign defaults to set up three reminder messages, but you can click the + Add Reminder text to add additional reminder messages.
You can also delete the reminder messages if you don't want to send them.
You have two options for setting reminders. You can establish a reminder to be sent a set number of days relative to the last message sent or trigger a reminder to send on a specific date/time.
The default text for these messages thanks donors for their pledge and encourages them to complete their donation with a link to the donation form. As with many other customizable messages, you can use tags to tell recipients which organization they’re receiving the message from, how much was pledged, the campaign name, and a tag to insert the URL to the connected form. The tags available vary based on message type.
When setting up a reminder message that is relative to a previous message, you can set it to trigger a message in a selected number of minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. Type a number in the white box for the number of minutes, hours, etc. before triggering the message to send. Then select the unit of time from the drop-down menu to the right of the white box.
When setting up a reminder to send on a specific date/time, select that button and then choose a date using the calendar tool. After that, set the desired time to send the message by choosing the hour, minutes, and time of day using the drop-down buttons to the right of the calendar tool.
Click Add New Text Campaign when you’ve finished configuring the settings.
Text-to-Donate Table
Your campaign will now appear in the Text-to-Donate table. You can toggle it on and off as needed.
The table displays the campaign name, whether a donation amount is required when texting, the keyword for the campaign, and the number of unfulfilled and fulfilled pledges linked to the Text-to-Donate campaign.
Pro tip: You can have multiple keywords for a single campaign. To set a keyword as the “primary” one for the campaign, simply drag it to the top of the table so it’s first in the list. When participants create their own keywords in the fundraising center, the primary campaign keyword will be displayed to them.
To the right of the campaign information are Edit and Delete buttons, which allow you to modify or delete your Text-to-Donate campaigns.
If you choose to delete a campaign, a pop-up message will appear asking you to confirm that you'd like to delete it. Be careful—this can't be undone!
Please note: You'll see that we track character limit when you're composing your messages, and we want to explain why and how that impacts you and your recipients:
SMS concatenation built into most newer phones helps keep messages in one block, but under the hood, recipients receive one message for every 160-character block in most cases. So, it may look like one message, but if the person receiving is being billed per text, they will have that count increase by count/160.
Looking for information about your text-to-donate pledges? Check out the Text-to-Donate report!
How Donors Use Keywords
Once your keyword is set up, participants and donors can make a donation by texting your keyword plus the amount they'd like to donate to 50155.
Once they've sent that text, donors will receive a link to the full donation page so they can complete their donation.
When donors follow the link to complete their gift, they'll need to input their personal and payment details. If you'd like to configure the fields that donors must complete in order to submit their gifts, check out the Donation Fields article. By default, all contact information fields are required so you will be sure to gather all relevant contact details from your donors.
Text-to-Donate for Participants and Teams
A cool element of Text-to-Donate for Peer-to-Peer is that your participants and teams can create and share their own keywords to share with supporters.
Once you have a campaign keyword, participants can set their own personal text giving keywords. When a donation is made to their keyword, it will go toward their personal fundraising goal.
Please note: Participants won’t see the option to set up their own keywords until you’ve set an overall keyword for the campaign.
Similarly, team and classification captains can set keywords for their teams and classifications. Donations made to those keywords will go to the associated fundraising goal.
A participant can set their own keyword by clicking the Text Giving tab from their personal fundraising dashboard.
They'll be presented with an area to manage their keywords.
The campaign-wide keyword that you’ve set up will appear first under Donate to Campaign. Participants will need to use the campaign keyword along with their personal keywords when sharing with donors.
Pro tip: If you have multiple campaign keywords, participants will see the primary keyword as well as a tooltip that will display the other keywords.
They’ll see that a personal keyword has been automatically generated for them using the name with which they registered.
The participant can copy the keyword for sharing by clicking the Copy icon.
Please note: Clicking the Copy icon copies both the campaign keyword and the personal keyword, which will need to be sent together when donors text the Text-to-Donate number.
If they’d like to use a keyword other than the one that’s automatically generated, they can edit it by clicking the Edit icon.
When they click Edit, they’ll see a field where they can type a new keyword and then click Save Text Keyword. Clicking the trash can icon here cancels the edits.
Please note: If you updated an existing peer-to-peer campaign to Donations Beta prior to August 5, 2024, any existing registrants for that campaign will not have keywords automatically generated for them. When they access the Text-to-Donate interface, they’ll see the option to create and save their own keywords.
Keywords that have been used for another organization, form, or event cannot be reused—participants will receive an error message letting them know they should choose a new keyword if they enter one that's already in use.
If a participant is a team and/or classification captain, they'll see additional fields to create keywords for their team and/or classification.
Clicking See it in action in the How It Works area will display an introduction message to explain how donors use the keywords.
The Number to Text area displays the shortcode phone number to which donors will text the keyword. Participants can click the Copy icon to copy the number for sharing.
Please note: Always take autocorrect into consideration when creating your keywords! If you have a keyword that is made up of a few words put together, it's possible that autocorrect could change it in a donor's phone before they hit send, causing the donation to be unsuccessful.