Collecting donations is an important part of a non-profit’s survival and the process should be completely automated. Using a form tool like Typeform you can easily collect donations from your donors right on your website. You can even collect payment via credit card right on the form.
To take the automation one step further, you can use Formstack Documents to automatically generate a donation receipt that can be emailed directly to the donor (without anyone on staff manually generating the receipt). In this example, we’re going to show you exactly how to do that!
To get started, we’re going to build our receipt template using the online document builder inside Formstack Documents. From the Documents page in Formstack Documents, click the New Document button and enter a name for the document. On the next step, pick the Build Your Own document type and continue to the next step.
Next, you’ll be taken to the Document Builder where you can setup the donation receipt. We’re going to add our logo, contact info, and then merge fields where we want to put the donor’s information. These merge fields look like this: {$FirstName}, {$Amount}, etc.
Here’s what our template looks like:
Once we have our template setup, we’re going to move on to the Settings tab. Here you can modify settings like the type of file that we want to generate and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and then we’re going to add the Donation Number to the name of the file.
After we finish the settings, it is time to setup the delivery of our receipt so that it is emailed directly to our donor. From the Deliver tab, you should see an email delivery that is setup by default. We’re simply going to edit this delivery so that it goes to our donor.
For the “To” address, we’re going to pick the merge field we have setup for the email address of the donor. Feel free to change any of the other settings in the email :)
Once you have the email delivery saved, it’s time to setup the integration with Typeform!
To help with the integration with Typeform, we’re going to use our friends over at Zapier. With Zapier, you’ll be able to setup an integration without writing any code and each time you get an entry through your Typeform, it will automatically be sent to Formstack Documents and the receipt will be generated.
From within Zapier, go ahead and create a new Zap. Pick Typeform as the Trigger service and then pick New Entry as the trigger.
You’ll be asked to authenticate your Typeform account so that Zapier can detect new entries. Follow those steps and then pick the form that you want to use.
Next, we’re going to setup the Action. Pick Formstack Documents as the service then New Document Merge as the action. You’ll be asked to authenticate your Formstack Documents account. Follow those steps.
On the next step, you’ll need to pick the document that you just setup in Formstack Documents. Once you pick the document, Zapier will load a list of all the merge fields you have setup in your document. For each of your merge fields, you’ll need to pick the corresponding Typeform fields. This tells Zapier how to send Typeform data over to Formstack Documents so that it gets populated in the correct spot on your document.
Once you have all of the fields mapped, go ahead and finish the Zap and then make sure to activate the Zap. From now on, each time you get a new entry from that form, the data will automatically be sent over to Formstack Documents and your receipt will be emailed directly to the donor.
Go ahead and give it a try! Here’s what our receipt looks like:
That’s it! You’re all done! You can now easily populate all types of documents with data collected via Typeform. Can you think of other ways that you could use Formstack Documents to simplify your paperwork process?