How To Prepare For Giving Season
With Jotform + Square
Annabel: Hey everyone. Thank you for joining our webinar: How to prepare for giving season with Jotform and Square. Today’s presenters are going to be myself, Annabel, from Jotform. I work on the marketing team, and we also have a special cohost from Square named Victor. Victor, would like to introduce yourself?
Victor Absolutely. Hey everyone, my name is Victor Wong, and I manage product partnerships over at Square. Super excited to be here, and I have the great fortune of working with the fantastic Jotform team.
Annabel: Awesome. Thanks Victor.
Annabel: So in today’s webinar, we’re going to be showing you an overview of Jotform and Square and how the tools can be beneficial for nonprofits. Besides that, we’ll also demo how to build a donation form and how to integrate that form with Square. And then we’ll close webinar with a live Q&A.
Annabel: With that said, we’re going to shift gears, go off camera and jump into our presentation. You may be wondering why you should make the most of giving this season. Giving season is the most important quarter of the year for nonprofits since this is when you’ll receive most of your donations. According to Nonprofits Source, 30 percent of annual giving occurs in December, and 10 percent of annual giving occurs in the last three days of the year.
Annabel: So it’s really important that you have a good workflow in place and really powerful tools like Jotform and Square so you can collect donor information and payments simultaneously.
Annabel: Jotform is the preferred online form builder for nonprofits. And that’s because we offer a really awesome discount, which is 50 percent off all of our plans.
Annabel: Besides that, nonprofits can use Jotform to collect information, such as donor information, donations, volunteer registrations, employee evaluations, event information, and more. Jotform replaces paper, checks, and cash and so you can keep all of your donations safe from getting lost or misplaced.
Annabel: It also makes following up with donors easier, and you can choose between a half dozen email marketing integrations to easily get in touch now or later with donors. We have some integrations like Constant Contact or MailChimp and Square, obviously, as well. Jotform is also incredibly easy to use. It requires zero technical skill, so anybody on your team can build a form with ease. And if you don’t want to build a form, you can choose from one of our many nonprofit-specific templates.
Annabel: So that’s kind of a high-level overview of Jotform. I’m now going to pass the mic over to Victor to talk about Square.
Victor: Great, thanks Annabel. Nonprofits everywhere have collected millions of donations with Square, and there are a couple of key reasons why we’re the preferred payment gateway for nonprofits. The first is you can take payments anytime and anywhere with Square. Whether it’s online with great partners like Jotform or in person with our sleek and affordable hardware. We’re also serious about security. We provide comprehensive data security compliance coverage. We are considered to be a PCI Level 1 compliant payment gateway. We also offer end-to-end payments encryption.
Victor: Third, we are payments partner that’s on your side. Square is the merchant of record so our interests are aligned with yours. That’s why we provide active fraud prevention and dispute management services at no additional cost. Fourth, we have fully transparent pricing. We have no long-term contracts and no hidden fees. What that means is we don’t have refund fees, setup fees, statement fees, authorization fees, or any other fees associated with payments. We also provide the same flat rate for all credit cards. What you see is what you get.
Victor: Finally, we have fast deposits that come standard. We know cash flow is super important. So that’s why we provide bank deposits within one to two business days. We also have an Instant Deposit option. And lastly we have a new Square debit card. It’s a physical debit card that allows you to have immediate access to funds. Our goal is really to give you peace of mind on the payment side so you can focus on what you do best.
Victor: Now we’ve teamed up with Jotform to offer nonprofits a powerful solution that comes with two key benefits. The first is higher payment limits. As a special bonus, when you integrate your Jotform with Square, you can take 10 times more donations than with any other payment processor on Jotform. The second is recurring donations. You can take a one-time donation or invite your most loyal supporters to opt into a recurring donations plan.
Annabel: All right, awesome Victor. Thank you so much for that overview. OK, everyone. Now we’re going to jump into a demo of Jotform and Square and show you how to build a donation form, provide tips on how to optimize your forms, connect with Square, and then test out the full solution. So, this is the Square donation form that we have already premade.
Annabel: And this is just so we can save some time and really talk about the meaty parts of this. So, firstly when you’re building a donation form, it’s really important to ask the right questions. Nobody likes filling out forms. So we recommend keeping your questions as concise as possible.
Annabel: Some really key questions that you should include are of course a name and an email. Emails are really important for keeping in touch with your donors and cultivating that long-term relationship because monthly donations are going to get you more money in the long term than just a single donation. Besides that, it’s also really great to collect their phone numbers and their addresses. A lot of donors really appreciate a phone call every now and then — especially if it’s their birthday or some sort of special event — so that they know you care, and they’re reminded of your nonprofit.
Annabel: Besides that, another really important thing to consider when building your form is customization. As you can see here, we have the welcome page. We have a special logo that goes with our nonprofit — Dolphins in need. We also have customized the background image to show dolphins so that people can see exactly what it is they’re donating to or the cause that they’re donating to. And then you can also customize the CTA button. So as you can see here, we start with the text that comes premade with your forms, but you can actually change that.
Annabel: So we’ll change that right now, and we’ll show you to donate. Just small fixes like this will really help people understand what your form means and will help them fill it out to completion. And another thing that really sets our forms apart from other competitor forms is the special features and integrations that we offer. Jotform offers conditional logic, which is super easy to access. You just click on the settings tab in the middle, and then you have the conditions on the side. So basically with conditional logic, you can either show or hide certain fields depending on how somebody answers the question.
Annabel: This is really great for creating a personable customized form, and it really helps people complete the form faster than if they had to go through every single question. We also have a really great PDF Editor. So this might come in handy if you were going to collect volunteer registrations and you wanted to get a PDF of all of your volunteers’ information and have that stored somewhere in your Google Drive or what have you.
Annabel: And so you can also take advantage of that for free. Like I mentioned earlier, your form has over 100 different integrations that can also be accessed through the settings tab. And if you come to the integrations page, you can see that there’s a number of different types like Slack, Google Drive. There are some CRMs, payment providers such as Square. So it’s really a full suite of different types of integrations to choose from.
Annabel: We’re going to come back and show you how to connect with a Square account.
Annabel: So again I’m going to come back to the settings tab here in the middle. I’m going to come down to integrations. I am going to search for Square, which is right over here. Now I’m going to connect with my Square account. OK, great. And I’m going to pass the mic over to Victor to talk through what we do with this integration.
Victor: Thanks Annabel. So after you’ve connected your Square account with Jotform, first thing you need to do is to select your business location. This is the Square location to which funds from Jotform will deposit into. The next thing to do is to make sure that the currency in Jotform matches the currency of your Square account.
Victor: So in this case, it would be the U.S. dollar. Next, you can select the payment type to sell subscriptions.
Victor: That way you enable recurring payments. When you hit continue, you’ll be directed to create your first subscription. So head up to the button to create new subscription, and name your subscription type. So in this case, you can just name it donate, and then input the price. This is the donation amount. Now a pro tip is to ask your donors for a higher donation amount than you expect. You can prefill a higher donation amount, and chances are you’ll end up with a higher donation per person.
Victor: Now you can select your subscription period. It can be monthly, every two months, every three months, every six months, yearly, or every two years.
Victor: Let’s stick with every month. You can also designate the number of payments that are part of this subscription. So for now, let’s just default to no limit. Next go to variable price.
Victor: And I recommend toggling this too. This allows the donor to input the donation amount they would like to give. Scroll down to save, and then you’re all set. You have created your first subscription. Now exit out of the payment settings, and go back to your payment form to click the little gear on the side. Here you can put in question text to describe the call to action. So here it’s donate, and you can add a little descriptor here to say, “Subscribe to become a monthly donor.” And then you’re all set and ready to go see receive your first donations.
Victor: Now one thing I would add is that integrated payments that come from the Jotform-Square solution automatically show up in your Square dashboards. So if you receive payments from any other channels, all the reporting is streamlined in your Square dashboard.
Annabel: Thank you so much for that, Victor.
Annabel: So before we jump into the Q&A, I just want to quickly show you what the form will look like in its final version. If you toggle the preview form tab over here, you’ll be able to see the first welcome card, which has our logo on it, and it has that awesome background image showing the cause that somebody is donating to. It has the title and a brief description about what it is they’re donating to. And then we just simply click through, we have name, email, phone number, address, donate. So here if I were to donate, I would press the Subscribe button, and then I automatically have this $100 that pops up.
Annabel: And then if I wanted to change the amount, I’d be able to do in this box right here. I’m going to keep that $100, and then we’ll hit Next again, and we’ll come to our credit card information, and then once we finish that, we press Submit, and then all of that payment goes directly into your Square dashboard.
Annabel: So that’s it for a demo. We’re now going to go into our Q&A portion of the webinar.
Annabel: Perfect. So we’re going to jump into the questions and answers portion of the webinar. If you have any questions, we ask that you please either type them into the chat tab or into the questions tab. So to kick it off, we have a question from Jackie, and this one’s for Square.
Annabel: So Jackie asks, “What are Square’s fees?”
Victor: Hey Jackie, thanks for that question.
Victor: Any payment that is submitted through Jotform, there would be one flat fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction. I would note that if your nonprofit process is more than $250,000 in credit card transactions each year, you may be eligible for lower custom rates. For that, I recommend you contact Square support to connect with the Square sales team.
Annabel: Thank you, Victor. It looks like we have a question from Sarah in the chat section, and she’s asking, “How easy is this to put on our website?” David would you mind answering this one for Sarah?
David: Sure. We have many different types of embed codes readily available. You build your form, and then to embed it to your own web page is a simple copy and paste of usually anywhere from one line of code for our basic JavaScript embed code to a little bit longer embed code, but we generate that embed code for you. Any web page that has a simple HTML format, you can copy and paste. And we also have various embed codes for different platforms like WordPress and Wix and that sort of thing.
Annabel: Awesome, thank you, David. Looks like we have a question from Gerald, and he asks, “How will my payment be sent to Square?” So Gerald, if your integration has been properly configured, you can check this out live mode. Then once somebody submits your form, that payment will be sent automatically into your Square account, and then from there you’ll be able to access the funds.
Annabel: And then we have another question for Square. This one is from Liam: “What makes Square better than PayPal and Stripe?”
Victor: So a couple of reasons that I touched upon earlier. The first is what we describe as omnichannel payments capability. That essentially means you can easily take payments in person or online. We also have a really high quality and affordable hardware. And lastly we have free business management and reporting software via the Square point of sale app or dashboard. I do want to touch on Gerald’s question as well on how to the funds from Square get you. So once the funds get deposited into your Square account, you would need to connect your Square account to your bank account.
Victor: So that would allow just the daily flow of whatever funds are in your Square account directly into your bank account. The other option is if you have Square account, you are eligible for what’s called a Square card, which is essentially a debit card that would allow you to immediately access any funds that are in your account.
Annabel: Awesome. Thank you, Victor. We have a question here: Would this be suitable for subscription only, or it can be used for a one-time donation? Of course, you can configure your payments however you decide to. We do offer one-time donations as well, but we do recommend, at least for me, I worked for a nonprofit before Jotform, and you know, we always try to get people to donate monthly because then that will increase your donations over time and you’ll get more money in the end, which is always good for nonprofits.
Annabel: But, yeah, it’s totally up to you and totally customizable. Awesome. So we have a question here from John that says, “Can Jotform be customized for seminar registrations?” David would you mind taking this one?
David: Jotform can be customized for just about anything you want. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a nonprofit or anything like that. If you want to essentially set up an entire store using Jotform with multiple products, multiple variations of those products, options, anything you could imagine. Seminar registrations? Absolutely. If you want to collect payment for that seminar at the same time using Square or something else? Absolutely.
Annabel: Great. Thanks David. We have a question from Emmanuel who’s asking, “What happens if a donor’s card gets declined?” That’s a really good question. So if a donor card gets declined, we recommend that you reach out to them and ask for a new one, and then you can simply go into your Square dashboard and update that information.
Annabel: We have a question here from Jasmine: “I saw something on Jotform about the first 100 Square payments being free. Can you please explain how this works?” Victor, would you mind taking this one?
Victor: Sure, happy to. As part of Square’s partnership with Jotform, any payments taken through this Square integration on Jotform do not apply to Jotform’s payment submission limits, only Jotform’s form submission limits. So that means that for Jotform’s free plan, which ordinarily limits the number of payment submissions to 10 per month, you could instead now accept up to 100 payments with Jotform and Square on Jotform’s free plan for no additional charge. I would note that Square’s transaction fees do still apply to these payments.
Victor: But, you can get the first 100 payments on the Jotform and Square integration on their free plan for no additional cost.
Annabel: Perfect. Thank you. We have a question from Hudson, asking, “What is the cost for nonprofits?” So this is a good time to talk about Jotform’s nonprofit discount. As Victor briefly touched on, we do have a free plan. There are some limitations to that free plan, though. So we do recommend that nonprofits upgrade to either the Bronze, Silver, or Gold. If you do so, we do offer a 50-percent nonprofit discount, and it’s available for all the plans. It comes in handy. All we ask is that you fill out a really simple application form and then within 24 hours, we’ll review it and then get back to you on whether or not it’s approved.
Annabel: So next question from Donna: “Is there a limit to the number of questions Jotform allows? Wondering if we can use this for our membership.” David, would you mind taking this one from Donna?
David: Sure. There is no hard limit as in a set limit to the amount of questions you can add to a form. One hundred if you’d like. The only real limitation is if at some point you add enough that the browser itself can’t handle it. And this generally happens around somewhere like a thousand plus fields with a lot of conditional statements. So for most regular usage, Jotform can handle just about anything you can throw at it.
Annabel: Perfect. Thank you, David. And then we have a question here from John, asking, “Does this nonprofit need to be a 501(c)(3)?” David, could you please take this one?
David: We do need to be able to verify nonprofit status. Usually the easiest way to do so is having that 501(c)(3) paperwork. But if there is an alternate way that we can get verifiable paperwork that does prove you’re a nonprofit, we’ll accept just about anything.
Annabel: Perfect. Thank you. We have a question here from Darnell, asking if it’s possible to charge every three or six months instead of monthly. And the answer is yes. Our users have the ability to change their subscription period to monthly, every two months, every three months, every six months, yearly, and every two years. There’s a lot of flexibility depending on how you prefer to collect your donations.
Annabel: Let’s see. Any other questions?
Annabel: OK, give it a couple more seconds. If you guys have other questions, please ask us. Otherwise we’ll just continue to the thank-you slide.
Annabel: Looks like you have a question from Linda: “I don’t see the IATS as an integration with Jotform. I have requested that as an option. How long does it take to integrate a new credit card processing option?” David, would you mind taking this one?
David: To process with a new credit card integration, as in set up an integration with a new payment provider, we usually do feature requests based on overall demand for a feature. Things do take quite a bit of resources to set up PCI-compliant payment processing and that sort of thing. And so, unless we have a very large overall demand for a specific feature, especially something like a payment provider, we generally don’t say that we’ll add them all. But if there is a large request overall for something, we generally do add it, but we can’t add everything, unfortunately.
Annabel: Thanks David. Well we have two questions left. One from Anthony and one from Tracy. So Anthony is asking, “Does Square integrate with Jotform’s free account, or do you need the Bronze?” Yes, Anthony, you can integrate Square with Jotform’s free account.
Annabel: We have a last question here from Tracy: “Would this work for the big day of giving and give back? Nonprofit spring and fall fundraising days.” Yeah, Tracy, it’s totally up to you for however you want to get everyone to use the integration. We just promoted it as being for giving season, but you can use it if you want to in the spring or the fall or whatever works best for you.
Annabel: OK. So that’s it for today’s webinar. I’m going to jump over to the thank-you slide and just want to thank everybody again for watching today.
Annabel: We hope you found it useful, and if you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out to the Jotform support team at support@jotform.com, and I’m gonna pass the mic over to Victor to give his closing remarks.
Victor: Great, thanks Annabel. I really appreciate you all being on this webinar. Super excited again to team up with Jotform to power this integration and wishing you all the very best giving season.
Annabel: Thanks everyone. Have a good rest of your day.