Event Registration Forms Training Webinar

These videos cover how to build forms that collect event registrations, both payment and non-payment forms. Sell tickets, sponsorships, and more.

Get started collecting online donations in DonorSnap’s Responsive Forms through Stripe.

Event Registration Forms 101

Get started collecting online registrations in this general overview. Learn how to choose the right form type for your event: Donation, Interaction with Payment, or Interaction, and process the submissions afterwards to load them into your database.

Event Registration Forms 201

Walk through examples of building event forms start to finish. Explore the multiple options and capabilities of the forms including sections, fields linked to the amount, and styling.

Looking for a shopping cart like experience? Watch the Form Totals Webinar. This 30 minute webinar specifically covers building close to a “shopping cart” of multiple fields on a form, adding to one Amount Total to be charged, and how to split donations once processed in to DonorSnap.

Inside Event Registration Forms 101

In this webinar we cover:

• Choosing between a Donation form for paid events and an Interaction form for free events
• Watching a live sponsorship submission download into DonorSnap
• Processing registrations from the Responsive Forms Open Records box on your dashboard
• Using Auto-Link Contacts by Email to avoid duplicate contact records
• Dragging fields, headers, and sections into the Form Builder
• Hiding the appeal, donation type, and payment method behind default values
• Starting from the predefined Donate Now template or a form you built last year
• Customizing the confirmation page, confirmation email, and submit button under Settings
• Adding the processing fee and Bill Me options
• Grabbing the embed code, or using the direct forms.donorsnap.com link

Quick Recap of the 101 Session

The trainer opened with a tour of sample event pages — a gala ticket form, a student recital signup, and a sponsorship form — to show what the finished product looks like on a live website. She filled out the sponsorship form as a supporter, paid by credit card, and then followed that single submission all the way through: the thank-you screen, the automatic confirmation email, the open record waiting on the DonorSnap dashboard, the email match against an existing contact, and finally the payment sitting on that contact’s Donations tab. From there she moved into the Form Builder to show how the form was assembled, built a second form from scratch using the Donate Now template, worked through the Settings tab, and grabbed the embed code. The session closed by building an Interaction form for a free event and summarizing the two form types.

Event Registration Forms 101 Summary

What an Event Registration Form Actually Is
An event form in DonorSnap is what the software calls an online form, or a Responsive Form, and it does one job: it links your website to your donor database. A supporter visits a page on your website (or the direct form link), buys a ticket or commits to a sponsorship, and that submission downloads back into DonorSnap.

Choosing the Right Form Type: Donation or Interaction
Every event form is one of two types, and the choice comes down to whether money changes hands. If guests are paying — buying tickets, purchasing a table, committing to a sponsorship level — you build a Donation form. The trainer stressed not to get hung up on the word donation. It refers to where the record lands in DonorSnap, which is the Donations tab on the contact record, the same tab that holds auction purchases, in-kind gifts, and event payments. If the event is free, you build an Interaction form instead. Interactions are the non-financial side of the contact record: this person attended the annual meeting, this person signed up for the members’ picnic. Save-the-date signups, free class registrations, and RSVP forms all belong here. The building process is identical for both; only the available fields differ.

Walking Through a Live Sponsorship Submission
To show the full round trip, the trainer completed a sponsorship form as a supporter would. She selected a $100 sponsorship level, added a $300 additional donation, and checked the box to cover the credit card fees, and the form calculated the $410 total on screen. After entering a test card and submitting, three things happened in sequence. The screen changed to a confirmation page saying the submission was received and listing what had been entered. An email arrived immediately with a copy of the completed form, which the guest keeps for their records. And the submission downloaded into DonorSnap. She pointed out that the confirmation email is customizable and is a natural place to remind people where the event is, what to bring, and — if you add your tax ID number — to serve as a receipt.

Processing Registrations from Open Records
A registration does not create or update a contact on its own. It arrives as an open record and waits. The trainer’s dashboard showed a yellow box listing each form and how many submissions were pending; this comes from an app you add to your dashboard yourself. Expanding the form reveals the submissions, and the color coding matters. A blue line means clicking Load will create a brand new contact. Before loading anything, click Auto-Link Contacts by Email at the top, which searches your database for the email address each guest entered. Matched records change color and the key at the bottom of the screen confirms that loading will now update the existing record rather than create a second one. The trainer noted that an accidental duplicate is not a catastrophe — duplicates can be merged later — but matching first is the cleaner path.

Reviewing a Submission Before You Load It
The Edit button on the left of each open record opens a side-by-side comparison: what the guest just typed on one side, what DonorSnap already has on the other. In the demonstration the submitted record listed a different state than the stored record, and the trainer explained the rule plainly — what the guest filled in wins. The assumption is that someone completing your form has given you their current address, phone number, and email, so that information overwrites what you had. Reviewing this screen is your chance to catch anything that looks wrong before it enters the database. In practice you will rarely process one registration at a time. With seven pending, the workflow is: click Auto-Link Contacts by Email, review and mark each record ready individually, then click the Load button at the top once to send all seven in together.

Where the Registration Lands in DonorSnap
After loading, the contact record reflects everything the form collected. Under Community > Contacts, the updated address showed on the contact information tab, and the payment appeared on the Donations tab dated the day of the submission. Opening the payment showed the date, that it came through Stripe, the full amount charged, the donation type of Sponsorship, the appeal it was tied to, and the acknowledged box already checked — all of it populated by hidden fields on the form rather than typed in by hand. The trainer flagged what was not filled in: no accounting code, no campaign, no accounting period. Those are fields you can add to the form yourself if your organization uses them, and they are worth checking before your first event goes live.

Building the Form in the Form Builder
Each form has two tabs, Settings and Form Builder, and both matter. In the Form Builder, the left panel holds everything you could put on the form and the right panel is the form itself. You drag an element from the left onto the form, then click its gear icon to configure it. Headers, text, and the fields from your database all work this way; the X on a field removes it. The left panel is organized with contact fields first — first name, last name, email, employer, job title, middle name — and the donation fields below them, including campaign, accounting code, and class. The trainer’s advice was to scroll the whole list before you finish, because anything you skip is a field you may end up filling in by hand later. Sections group related fields, and the Manage Sections control at the top lets you reorder them, so contact information can sit above the payment area or below it. Each section has its own gear icon and can be given its own color, which helps visually separate the two halves of the form.

Hiding Fields with Default Values
One of the most useful technique in the session was setting a field to a fixed value and then hiding it from the guest. On the sponsorship form the appeal code was pulled in, given a default value naming the event, and hidden — so every submission is automatically tagged to that event without the guest choosing anything from a dropdown. The same pattern set the payment method to Stripe, the donation type to Sponsorship, and the acknowledged box to checked. None of it appears on the form, and all of it arrives with the record. The trainer applied the same approach to a new golf outing form, setting the donation type and an appeal code for the fall outing and hiding both. Use this for any value that is the same on every submission; give guests a visible choice only where the choice is real, like sponsorship level.

Creating a New Form and Choosing a Template
New forms start with Add New Form, where you give the form a name and choose its type. Donation is the type for anything involving a payment. You then select the payment processor, and this is the prerequisite worth knowing before you start: Stripe must already be connected. You cannot build a payment form now and set up Stripe afterward. Organizations with more than one Stripe account will see each listed and can point a form at a specific one. Rather than starting from a blank form, the trainer recommended clicking Template, which offers both the forms you have already built — useful when this year’s event resembles last year’s, since it copies images and formatting across — and a predefined Donate Now template that ships with the software. That template arrives with contact information and payment information already split into two sections and hidden fields already embedded, and it remains fully customizable. Her recommendation was to start from it nearly every time.

Settings: Images, Confirmation Page, and Confirmation Email
The Settings tab has its own menu. Page Setup is where colors are set and where you can upload one image to sit at the top of the form — and it must be resized before uploading, because the form displays it at whatever size you give it up to the full screen width. The Confirmation Page section controls the thank-you screen, where the trainer suggested wording that fits the situation (“Thank you for your sponsorship,” “please print this record as your receipt”) along with a tax ID number if relevant. The Confirmation Email section is the one not to skip: if you leave it alone, guests still get an email, but it comes from [email protected]. Change the sender name and address to your own, and use the blind copy field — which accepts multiple comma-separated addresses — so your treasurer or events coordinator is notified on every registration. The Submit Button section sets the button’s wording and color, so a sponsorship form can say Sponsor Today rather than Submit.

Letting Guests Cover Processing Fees
Two optional fields in the left panel are worth considering for event forms. The Processing Fee field adds a checkbox letting guests add a percentage to cover credit card costs. As the trainer put it, the difference is negligible on a $15 yoga class and substantial on a $3,000 sponsorship. The field label itself cannot be renamed, but the default percentage can be adjusted up or down — some organizations match what they pay Stripe, others set it slightly higher. The Bill Me field adds a checkbox that hides the credit card section entirely, letting a guest commit now and pay later, which suits sponsorships and pledged table purchases. Her general advice for any unfamiliar field: drag it in, click the gear icon, and look at what the options actually are.

Getting the Embed Code and Going Live
Back on the form listing, each form has a Form Link button on the right containing two things. The first is HTML code to email to your web designer, who builds a page on your site and drops the code where their platform expects it — the mechanics differ between WordPress, Wix, and hand-coded sites, but every platform has a place for it. Once embedded, the form renders as a box on your page, with a scroll bar if it is long. The second is a direct forms.donorsnap.com link where the form already lives, which is the answer for organizations without a website: send that link out instead. The trainer demonstrated the payoff of the embed approach by changing a section heading in the Form Builder, saving, and refreshing the live form — the change appeared immediately. Your web designer handles the embed once; every edit after that publishes itself.

Building an Interaction Form for a Free Event
For a free event, the form type is Interaction, and the Form Builder offers interaction fields instead of donation fields. There are three: date, type, and comment. The trainer set all three to default values and hid them. Leaving the date empty stamps the record with the date the guest submits the form; entering the event date instead records the event date on every submission. The interaction type was set to Attended an Event, and the comment was set to the event name, so each downloaded record reads as this person attended this event on this date. Beyond that, the form only needs whatever you want to collect. Her closing point was a strategic one: a free event may be the only time a new person ever gives you their information, so even though a short form is appealing, consider pulling in the full address block while you have the chance.

Two Takeaways
Donation-based forms are payment forms — tickets and sponsorships being the two big ones. Interaction-based forms are free events. And if you are building anything financial, set up Stripe first, under Maintenance > Site Setup > Integrations. That connection has to exist before a payment form can be built.

Inside Event Registration Forms 201

[coming soon]

Frequently Asked Questions

What kind of form do I use for event registration in DonorSnap? It depends on whether the event costs money. Paid events — ticket sales, table purchases, sponsorships — use a Donation form, because the payment records on the contact’s Donations tab. Free events use an Interaction form, which records attendance on the Interactions tab instead. The building process is the same for both; only the available fields change.

Why is my event ticket form called a “donation” form? Because the word refers to where the record goes, not what the payment is. In DonorSnap, the Donations tab holds everything financial on a contact record — event tickets, sponsorships, auction purchases, in-kind gifts, and actual donations. Choosing Donation as the form type simply routes the payment there. Your form can still be named “Golf Tournament Sponsorship” and say Sponsor Today on the button.

Do I need a Stripe account before I can build an event registration form? Yes, if the form collects payment. You have to select a payment processor while creating the form, so the Stripe connection must already exist — you cannot build the form now and connect Stripe later. Set it up under Maintenance > Site Setup > Integrations. Free Interaction forms do not require a payment processor.

Why aren’t my event registrations showing up in my database? They are most likely sitting as unprocessed open records. Submissions do not write to contact records without your approval. Expand the form in the Responsive Forms Open Records box on your dashboard, click Auto-Link Contacts by Email, review each submission, then click Load to send them into the database.

How does DonorSnap know which existing contact a registration belongs to? It matches on email address. The Auto-Link Contacts by Email button searches your database for the address each guest entered and links matching submissions to those existing contacts. Submissions shown in blue found no match and will create new contacts when loaded. If a duplicate does get created, it can be merged later.

What happens if a guest enters a different address than the one in my database? What they entered wins. When you click Edit on an open record, DonorSnap shows the submitted information beside the stored information, and loading the record overwrites the old values. The assumption is that someone filling out your form has just given you their current address, phone, and email. If changes need to be made, you can do so before loading in the record.

Can I add images and customize the look of my event registration form? Yes, you can change fonts and colors, give each section its own background color, and add images to the form — resized before you upload it, since it displays at full size. Custom CSS can also be added if your web designer would like additional customization.

Can I track which event a registration is for? Yes, by setting a hidden default value. Drag the appeal field — or campaign, if that’s where your organization tracks events — onto the form, click the gear icon, set the default value to the event name, and hide the field. Every submission arrives tagged to that event without the guest seeing or choosing anything.

Can I charge guests for the credit card processing fee? Yes, as an optional checkbox. Drag the Processing Fee field onto your form and it gives guests the option to add a percentage covering the card cost. The field label can’t be renamed, but the percentage can be adjusted — some organizations match their actual Stripe rate, others set it slightly higher. It’s a small matter on a $15 class and a significant one on a $3,000 sponsorship.

Can someone register for a paid event without entering a credit card? Yes, using the Bill Me field. Adding it to your form gives guests a checkbox that hides the credit card section, letting them commit now and be invoiced later. This is common on sponsorship forms and table purchases where an organization expects to send an invoice.

Can I be notified when someone registers for my event? Yes. In the form’s Settings tab, open the confirmation email section and enter one or more addresses in the blind copy field, separated by commas. Your treasurer, events coordinator, or both will get a copy every time someone registers. This is also where you replace the default [email protected] sender with your own name and address.

Do I need a website to use DonorSnap event registration forms? No. Every form has a direct forms.donorsnap.com link that you can email or post on social media, and the form works exactly the same way through it. The embed code is only necessary if you want the form to appear inside a page of your own site.

Does my web designer have to re-embed the form every time I change it? No, only once. The embed code points to your form, so any edit you make in the Form Builder or Settings appears on the live form as soon as you save and refresh the page. You can get a basic form onto your website quickly and keep refining it afterward without involving your designer again.

How do I set up a registration form for a free event? Create a form with the type Interaction. In the Form Builder you’ll have three interaction fields — date, type, and comment — which are usually set to default values and hidden. Leave the date empty to stamp the submission date, or enter the event date to record that instead. Set the type to something like Attended an Event and the comment to the event name.

Related Pages:

Stripe Payment Processing Integration
Donation Forms Training Webinar
Form Totals in Responsive Forms Training Webinar
Use Predefined Donation Amounts in Responsive Forms
Getting Started 107: Forms