Fresh New WidgetMakr Features Just in Time for Spring
We've hopefully had the last major winter storm of the year and spring is in the air. To celebrate spring, WidgetMakr is sprouting a healthy set of fresh new features.For those of you who don't know about WidgetMakr, it is a Republican online donation processing tool that:
- has some of the lowest merchant banking fees available anywhere,
- is fully integrated with the largest and most advanced Republican software platform, Crimson, and
- its back-end technology was used to raise over $200 million online for Republicans in 2012.
Here's why you should be as excited as we are:
New Dashboards
Without good information, it is hard to make solid fundraising decisions. In an effort to make your life easier, WidgetMakr's new dashboards now let you track:
Visitor-to-Donor Conversion RatesWhat percentage of the people who saw your donation form went ahead and made a gift. This is a key indicator of the effectiveness of your "ask." After going through all the trouble of getting donors to open your form, you want to make sure those folks take action. WidgetMakr's Conversion Rate indicator will help you track your successes. 
Which Donation Form Is Raising The Most Money?Now you can graph and compare your donation forms' performance against each other. You specify the date range and widgets you want to compare and WidgetMakr does the rest. 
Where are your donors?What geographies are driving your giving traffic? WidgetMakr now gives you a shiny new dashboard to see what cities or states are your biggest sources of gifts.
Thank You Page Redirects
WidgetMakr gives you total control over the online giving experience. You can now direct your users to your own custom thank you page upon successful submission of the form. If a thank you page isn't good enough for you, send them to a petition page, a survey or some other user flow.Your thank you page can live anywhere you want. This feature gives you the ability to provide a custom user experience for you donors AND another way to
- distribute cookies,
- utilize multi-channel funnel analytics, or
- simply click-track your donors.
If this sounds like too much work, don't worry, we still allow you to thank your donors with a simple pop-up "thanks" window and an email.
Widget Tagging
Are you a power fundraiser with lots of widgets? Odds are that you are A/B testing landing pages and need to organize your widgets by functions such as advertising initiatives, signup forms, surveys, social fundraising, etc. WidgetMakr now makes it easy to organize and sort your widgets by giving them tags.
For Developers
Power users, we are giving you the keys to control every aspect of how your forms look and behave while making sure your forms are scalable, functional and your data goes where it is suppose to go.
CSS LibraryAs you probably already know, you can apply your own special design look & feel to your forms using your own CSS. We now provide a way for you to store all your excellent CSS code in a library so anyone else in your organization can leverage your hard work.When you are creating your form, simply paste in your code and hit "Save to Library." Done and done. Now you can use that same CSS for any of your forms.Payment APIWidgets, we don't need no stinking widgets! We have our own hot-shot front end code gun.Excellent, there aren't enough of them around! Use our secure API to design, create, deploy and track your own forms, including donation forms. WidgetMakr will treat your elegantly coded page like a widget and allow the rest of the team to track its performance, just like any of your other widgets. Don't live in a data silo. Strut your custom code stuff without having to worry about data flow or security.