Social Media and Search Support

DonorPoint allows you to engage your supporters to share your pages on social media to get your desired message into the social channels of your supporters. Let’s see how….

Embedding Social Tags in Forms and Receipts

You enable social sharing on your pages by using the #{SOCIAL} merge tag, which is backed by the SEO/Social Settings options on forms. Different pages can have different content, and you can reuse common content across multiple pages as well. You can insert the tag into your Page Frames or Layouts, and you can reuse the tags multiple times on a page.

The #{SOCIAL} merge tag on forms displays icons that are links to social media sites that you select. Note that we include email in this list as a means of sharing.

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Each of these icons is a button which pops up the appropriate tool for sharing to that platform.
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The content for these popups is defined largely by the social media platform by reading your pages and extracting data from them - a process called “scraping”. DonorPoint provides default values for this data from your form definition, and allows you to expand on this with richer data through the SEO/Social Settings tab.

We’ll see how this works after showing how social media works on your pages.

Facebook Sharing

DonorPoint uses Facebook’s Sharing API to put an attractive, user friendly social prompt on your page: socialimage-3.png socialimage-4.png

You can specify the title your page will have when it appears in Facebook, and the description and image associated with it. One thing you cannot do is pre-populate the message your supporter is editing (this is prevented by Facebook policy, see the technical details below for additional information).

Twitter Sharing

For Twitter, DonorPoint pops up the tweet dialog, and creates an attractive ‘card’ tweet on your supporter’s twitter feed: socialimage-5.png socialimage-6.png

You can specify the title, description and image as in Facebook. In Twitter you can also specify the default content of the tweet for your supporter to edit.

Email Sharing

The email icon creates an email in your supporter’s email client, ready to send. socialimage-7.png

You can set the default subject and content. Restrictions in the way web browsers pop up the email client restrict your content to plain text.

How to set up content for social sharing

You select which social media platforms you want to present by checking the individual ‘enabled’ boxes on the “SEO/Social Settings” tab for your page: socialimage-8.png

The collection of settings can be reused across many forms, and are named so you can keep track of them.

UPDATE MAY 2023

The SEO/Social Settings tab now includes a preview panel, so you can see what a generic share will look like (as on the Catalog > Social Settings tab below, on the right).

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Google+ sharing support was discontinued.

LinkedIn sharing was added, so your supporters can share your campaigns and activities to their professional colleagues easily.

  • Check your public Catalogs, Forms and Community campaign sites that already have Social Settings configured, and activate LinkedIn as shown above.
  • Give LinkedIn sharing a test using your own LinkedIn account.
  • Bookmark the LinkedIn Post Inspector in your favorite browser: https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/

A launched share test to LinkedIn is shown below, from a Form > SEO/Social Settings tab:

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What kind of social media content can you specify?

The first group of options on the SEO/Social Media tab contain content that supports multiple social media platforms:

  • Title - the title for the page as it will appear in that platform
  • Description - the body of text describing the page on the social platform
  • Image - the image associated with the page on the social media platform

Facebook content is limited to these options. For Twitter you can also specify:

  • Twitter ID - your organization’s Twitter ID, necessary for Twitter cards to be open by default when tweeted
  • Twitter Content - default content to put in your supporter’s tweet

By default DonorPoint populates the tweet with the short URL version of the link to the current page.

For email you can specify default content for your supporter’s message:

  • Email Subject - the subject line for the email
  • Email Body - the default content of the email

DonorPoint merge tags are supported in the body of the email, in particular

  • #{REFERRALURL} - the link to the current page

By default DonorPoint shares the same page that the supporter is viewing or, if the sharing is done from a confirmation page, that they just made a transaction from. You can override these defaults to have the social media links share a different page. You can also override the page that is shared based one whether a specific item was in the transaction.

If you want to populate social messages with a link to a page other than the one from which the social share is generated, identify that URL in the field labeled “URL”. socialimage-9.png socialimage-10.png

Note that the destination URL must have social metadata in its header in order for the social media platforms to present good information.

How to override social settings for a specific item

Let’s say it’s possible for a constituent to “purchase” multiple items in a single transaction: an event, a membership and a donation. You want your supporter to share different content based on what they purchased. You can do this by setting SEO/Social Settings on the item. By default the social settings for an item default to those for the page on which it was purchased. You can create new settings by selecting the ‘+’ button, or can select social settings you’ve already defined. Note that if these are used in any other pages or items, any changes will apply to those as well.

If you define special social settings on an item the only settings that will have an effect are:

  • URL - the sharing links will point to the URL you identify. Note that the destination URL must have social metadata in its header in order for the social media platforms to present good information. If the destination URL is a DonorPoint page, this means that page must have social settings associated with it. If the destination URL is NOT a DonorPoint page, then you will want to check the social metadata in whatever content management system is associated with that page.

  • Twitter content - you can define the default content that populates a tweet

  • Email Subject - the default subject for the email from your supporter

  • Email Content - the default content for the email from your supporter

The technical stuff - Facebook

DonorPoint uses Facebook’s advanced Sharing API in order to customize the sharing features, giving you more control over the content and providing a better experience for your supporters:

  • Custom buttons - instead of the Facebook default ‘Share” or “Like” buttons, DonorPoint displays a more attractive consistent icon

  • Popup dialog - DonorPoint pops up the Facebook dialog in the context of the current page, instead of operating silently or distracting the supporter by opening a new browser tab

  • Custom URL - by default the Facebook share button points at the current page. You can specify the URL that the share points to, in order to direct people to other landing pages, for example the one for your general website or category page.

DonorPoint’s use of Facebook’s Sharing API ensures that changes by Facebook will be supported with no impact on existing pages. But there are some constraints as a result of Facebook’s protection of that API. The Facebook API requires the use of a code called an Application ID, which is created on Facebook’s developer page. This ‘appId’ is necessary to get the sharing popup to properly contain your content. DonorPoint has one appId installed by default for pages that are published using the gobigriver.com domain. However, Facebook restricts each appId to apply to only one domain. Customers who have their own custom domain enabled in DonorPoint need their own appId to cover that domain. When DonorPoint works with you to set up your own domain, DonorPoint creates an application in Facebook linked to your domain, and adds that appId to your profile to ensure that your Facebook links will work correctly.

Facebook gets the content that appears in the sharing popup, and is posted to a person’s page, by scanning the page periodically, looking for certain data like the page title, description and image. That’s the content that is set on the SEO/Social Settings tab on your page definition:

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Facebook, and other social media sites and search engines learn about web pages by reading their content, interpreting it and storing pieces for later use. Web pages tell these scanners what information they want to be known for. For example instead of using a file name as the title in a search result, the scanner looks for a tag in the web page named “". Facebook in particular looks for similar tags with the following information:

  • og:title - The Title for the page
  • og:image - the image associated with the page
  • og:description - the description of the page
  • og:url - the URL for facebook to point to and scan, if you want it to be different that the current page

DonorPoint sets these headers for your pages based on the information in the SEO/Social Setting tab. You can see all those on this example:

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Note how much you can customize how your pages get promoted. This is the information Facebook uses to build the story about a web page, and if specific content like an image is not defined, Facebook will look for some content in the body of the web page to fill that in. This is why you sometimes see web pages on Facebook with weird images or descriptions.

DonorPoint allows you to specify the title, URL, description and image via those fields on the SEO/Social Settings tab for your pages. Note that if you use the URL setting, it must be in the same domain or subdomain of DonorPoint pages. Remember, Facebook doesn’t allow us to cross domains! Also if that URL is not a DonorPoint page, your web team will have to make sure the tags that Facebook is looking for are in that web page’s header.

Note that Facebook prevents us from pre-populating any content in the popup box. This is documented at: https://developers.facebook.com/policy/#control

Note that your page has to be public for Facebook to be able to scan it. Otherwise you will receive an error.

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This is the same error you will receive if your pages are set up to use your own domain, but your Facebook appId is not set correctly.

Also Facebook will store this error data as the sharable data for your page. Facebook only scans pages about every 30 days. When you publish your page, you may want to force Facebook to refresh it’s view of your page by going to the Facebook ‘linter’ page at developers.facebook.com. socialimage-15.png

Here you can check what Facebook has scanned for your page and force it to update that information with the current state of your form.

Twitter Metadata

Twitter has similar metadata tags as Facebook:

  • twitter:url - the URL the tweet points to, this defaults to the current DonorPoint page
  • twitter:title - the title of your page as it appears in the tweet
  • twitter:image - the image that appears within the tweet
  • twitter:description - the description of your page within the tweet
  • twitter:site - your organization’s twitter ID

In addition DonorPoint sets the “twitter:card” to “summary_large_image” which displays the metadata in twitters large card format on supporters’ feeds.

Note that the card may not be expanded by default on someone’s twitter feed unless you add your twitter ID to your SEO settings. This seems to be an undocumented feature or bug in twitter, and DonorPoint continues to research it.

Twitter has a website where you can see how your card will appear on your supporters’ feeds at: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

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