Utilising Hidden Fields

Whilst you may be familiar with being able to add as many fields (which are visible) to the donor (mandatory or non mandatory) such as address, state, postcode, t-shirt size, any other question you may want to capture, you also have the ability to capture fields which are not visible to the donor. 

This is quite useful for capturing Donor IDs, URNs (other CRM centric fields) on prefilled personalised EDMS, SMS and QR codes, where we can embed these fields in the URL we provide to you (you are probably familiar with personalised URLS by now on GiveEasy).

These can be easily set up from the same part as where you set up your normal additional fields.

You can also use hidden fields to capture the type or source i.e. the channel. For example, say you wanted to send out 3 x EDMs, 1 x SMS, 2 social posts and a direct mail piece and you wanted to capture very easily where the donations were coming from.

One way to do this, would be to utilise GiveEasy tracking link system, however this may result in a number (too many?) tracking links. The other way would be to use the hidden fields.

Say for example, we created a hidden field called Source

Then we could use the following for tracking (note I've just grabbed a charity from GiveEasy to show you)

So to track EDM1 you would have

https://bull-arab-rescue.giveeasy.org/default?custom_Source=EDM1

To track performance from EDM 2 you would have

https://bull-arab-rescue.giveeasy.org/default?custom_Source=EDM2

To track performance from Social Post 1 you would have

https://bull-arab-rescue.giveeasy.org/default?custom_Source=SocialPost1

When someone made a donation via these links, there would be another field in your CSV download (in my givings) called Source.

Essentially you can have custom_Source=xxxxx  (with xxxx being anything)

What does this mean in practice?

Instead of now having various tracking links, you can have just one appeal (in this case it is https://bull-arab-rescue.giveeasy.org/default but it could be any name you create) and use hidden fields to track (so long as you want an exact replica) of the top appeal for your various channels