Charity Checkout prides itself on offering charities an unrivaled service when it comes to customisable and branded payment services. Custom fields are the latest addition to our platform, and they are free to all customers.

We’ve launched custom fields because we recognise that even the smallest of charities has its own unique needs.  This feature allows you to customise your payment process with just a few clicks, enabling your charity to collect any information you might require from your supporters. This blog post will provide a brief introduction to our new feature.

Field Categories

There are two categories of custom fields:

Payment fields

You should use payment fields when you wish to capture information specific to a particular payment or donation. This could be something like a checkbox indicating agreement to special terms relating to the payment the user is making. Payment fields will capture data that will be accessible via the ‘Export’ feature under the ‘Payments’ section in ‘Accounts’, and the ‘Schedules’ section if it was a recurring payment. We also include custom payment field information on the confirmation email we send to you when your charity receives a payment.

User fields

You should use user fields when you wish to capture information about the supporter, rather than their donation or payment. This could be something like the supporter’s date of birth. User fields will stay with the donor, and the data you capture from them will only be accesible via the ‘Export’ feature under the ‘Donors’ section in ‘Accounts’.

Field Types

There are no less than six types of data you can capture with Charity Checkout’s custom fields. These are:

  • Single-line text field
  • Multi-line text field
  • Checkbox
  • Date field
  • Dropdown selection
  • Multi-select checkboxes (i.e. more than one option is selectable)

You can also decide whether you wish any given custom field to be mandatory or optional.

Field Locations

You can place a custom field almost anywhere on your Checkout. The Charity Checkout payment process consists of four simple steps, so you can choose where on the donor’s journey you ask for certain information about them.  There are only a few restrictions to this, such as it being impossible to place a mandatory custom field on the ‘Payment Success’ step, as the donor is free to close their browser at this stage and therefore not provide the information.


How to create and use custom fields

You’re now ready to start using our custom fields feature. Find out how with this short “how-to” blog post.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog post, we really hope you benefit from this new feature. Please do feel free to comment below with feedback or comments on this feature.