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!

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 one of your organization’s donation forms. You can also customize and automatically send out handy reminder messages to encourage completion of pledged gifts!

Please note: This article is about Text-to-Donate for standard Qgiv donation forms. To read about Text-to-Donate for peer-to-peer, check out this article.

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 checking your control panel by going to your Form Settings and scrolling down to the Text-To-Donate Keywords area.

Pro tip: You can also verify the number that donors will text in this area.

Text-to-Donate Settings with three shortcodes.png

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 donation form.

Setting Up a Campaign

To set up a Text-to-Donate campaign and configure your reminder messages on one of your donation forms, click the Text-To-Donate link in your form-level control panel.

This will display your existing Text-to-Donate campaigns. If you haven’t created a campaign yet, you can select either Add New Text Campaign next to Text-to-Donate or select “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.

From there, you can enter optional start and end dates and times for your Text-to-Donate campaign. Dates are used when you want to accept gifts for a specific period of time. Otherwise, they're easily turned off by clicking the toggle!

Text campaign has start and end dates.png

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 and encourage donors to complete their pledge.

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 configured settings to your liking.

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 pending and fulfilled pledges linked to the Text-to-Donate campaign.

To the right of the campaign information are Edit and Delete buttons, which allow you to modify or delete your Text-to-Donate campaigns.

Text-to-Donate table.png

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 recipients under the hood 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, 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 System Fields article. By default, all contact information fields are required so you will be sure to gather all relevant contact details from your donors.