Using URL Parameters To Create Donation Buttons In Action Network Emails
Decide What Buttons Your Need
Before creating your buttons you'll need to decide how many you want to use along with the amounts and recurring frequency. It's a good idea to not create too many. Three buttons is a good maximum.
Most fundraising campaigns will be focused on recurring income, and it's best practice to create separate Fundraisers for one-off and recurring donations. In this example we'll be using one fundraiser and creating buttons for both recurring donations and one-off. We'll create three buttons:
- £3 per month.
- £10 per month.
- £20 one-off.
Create The URLs
The first thing we need to do is get the URL of our Fundraiser. You can copy this from your address bar. You can also copy it from the Manage Fundraiser page in the Direct Link box, you'll just need to remove the string ?source=direct_link& from the end of the URL. You should have a URL that looks like this:
To create our £20 one-off donation URL we simply need to add the amount key along with a key value of 20, separated by an equals (=) sign, remembering to add a question mark (?) at the beginning to tell Action Network where the string begins.
To create the URLs for our two monthly donations, again we need to use the amount key, with values of 3 and 10. As we're adding a seconds parameter to the URL to define the recurring period we need to add an ampersand (&) to tell Action Network that we're starting a new parameter. We can then add the recurring key along with the key value of true. Our £10 recurring donation URL now looks like this:
The recurring=true parameter tells Action Network to make the donation recurring but doesn't set the frequency of the donation. To add the frequency of the donation we need to use the period key. First, we add an ampersand (&) to begin a new parameter and add the period key, followed by an equals sign (=) and the value recurring_monthly.
Our two URLs now look like this:
Add Your Buttons
To add the donation buttons to your email first switch to the Drag & Drop email editor. Then, from the content section on the right-hand side click on BUTTON and drag it into your email.
If you haven't already made Drag & Drop your default for email editing why not do it now: How To Set Drag & Drop For Email, And Query Mode For Reports As Your Default.
Click on the button, and in the options that appear on the right add one of your URLs. In this example we've dropped in the URL for a £20 one-off donation.
Click into the Button to edit the text and add some text that corresponds with the donation amount and frequency of your URL.
Create A Row Of Buttons
If you want to add a row of buttons you can do these easily by adding a block into which you'll drop your buttons. Blocks allow you to easily structure your content by adding columns to your email layout. In this example we're going to add all three buttons to a row, so we'll select a three-column block by selecting Blocks on the right-hand side, clicking on the three-column block and dragging it into our email body.
Once our block is in place we can then click on Content and drag buttons into each of the three columns.
Once your buttons are in place just follow the same steps as above for adding your URLs and editing the Button Text. You can also edit the button colour and shape until you're happy with how they look. You should end up with a row of buttons ready to include in your email.
Remember to send yourself a test email and check all of your links before hitting send!
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