Add "other" option for fund on NXT Donation Designer Form

Donors should be able to type a designation for their gift if they do not want the default, without us having to check all possible funds for them to choose from (literally hundreds).  This option is available in OE version of the donation form, but not yet in NXT version.

  • Chelsea Gell
  • Jan 10 2020
  • Reviewed: Voting Open
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    • Candy Reichert commented
      02 Feb 04:48

      I have to agree with Kristy's comment. I have been using a holding fund and renamed the Comments field to Fund of My Choice Name (Optional). Often donors do not fill in their desired fund name. This causes extra work and processing time to reach out to the donor to request their choice. Sometime it can take a couple days to get a response.

      If I make it required then all other donors get frustrated that the field is requried when they do not have anything to put in it.
      Example: www.southern.edu/give

      The OLX forms handle this properly.

    • Kristy Herrington commented
      31 Jan 19:22

      Hi Samantha -

      My initial thought is that you are correct that, from an admin stand point, it’s the same amount of work for the Advancement Ops team - It doesn’t matter if there is a holding fund or just a required comment box, we have to edit each gift that comes over with an “other” designation.

      So, that aside, I think the main issue that could be addressed is having conditional logic built in to allow a required text field to pop up when, and only when, a donor selects “other” from the drop down.

      As it is right now, making that text box required 100% of the time is a hindrance for donors making gifts to funds selected from the list and having it always available but not required for selecting “other” means we’ll very likely end up with people selecting “other” and not providing enough additional information for us to make a decision on where to designate their gift.

    • Admin
      Samantha McGuin commented
      31 Jan 15:16

      @Kristy Herrington can you clarify on your comment? You mentioned that creating a fund for "other" creates more work on the back-end transferring funds to where the donor wants it to go. Doesn't an admin have to touch this gift to attach it to the donor's requested fund, whether it is from a placeholder fund or from a comment field?

      We have done some initial design to solve this and it requires a generic/placeholder fund to be created, either by Blackbaud or by you, since the batch requires a fund to be present for us to write the gift into it.


      Right now we recommend utilizing the comment field or a custom field to collect fund requests, though this likely does require you to create a placeholder fund (ie/Write-in below) in the fund list for the best donor experience.

    • Kristy Herrington commented
      29 Jan 18:26

      I agree with this - please count the University of North Florida in as wanting the Other option, like we were able to utilize in NetCommunity. Creating another fund "Other" creates more work on the back-end transferring funds to where the donor wants it to go.

    • JoAnn Strommen commented
      December 26, 2024 15:48

      We need option for 'other' with text field for donor to enter name of their scholarship, their endowment, a special department fund, etc. Expecting donors to scroll through list of 2000 funds is unrealistic, not practical, leads to errors and is just not acceptable.

      It's a significant step backwards from existing web forms and using NetCommunity/OLX.

    • Hillary Cote commented
      November 16, 2022 16:08

      We have over 800 funds. Our donors did not like the query search in NetCommunity. I don't like that I have to click one at a time in NXT and go through each page. (This isn't the exact place for this complaint.)
      However - So that I don't have to include 800 funds in a drop down, or so that my donors don't have to know the exact name of a fund, it would be helpful to only display our top funds, and allow the donors to enter another fund.
      I made a workaround in which I give instructions for the donors to select a fund I created called "Other," and then type the fund name in a comment box, but that is clunky and confusing for someone who just wants to make an easy gift.
      We actually have used a third party for our donations because we can't do this. It might be easier on the back end, but that doesn't matter if there aren't gifts to process.

    • Cameron Alzubi commented
      July 07, 2021 19:41

      Surely this is not the only request. Can we merge duplicates? This is SO IMPORTANT and makes our faculty staff veto using the new and improved NXT Donation Forms (confirmation emails are prettier than OLX)