How to use News Match Donation Shortcode

As part of INN's support for the 2017 News Match campaign, we've released two WordPress plugins to help sites convert readers. News Match Donation Shortcode provides a donation form for your site to ease donations through the News Revenue Hub as part of the News Match campaign.

Prefer a video walkthrough? Watch this tutorial on youtube.

Installing the plugin

On your WordPress site, click on "Plugins" in the Dashboard menu. If you see an "Add New" button at the top of the page, click that.

If you don't see the "Add New" button or the "Plugins" menu, your user might not have permission to manage plugins on the site; you should contact your technical support and ask them to install News Match Donation Shortcode for you. Your site might require downloading the plugin ZIPs and uploading them via FTP instead of using WordPress' built-in plugin installation tools.

Configuring the plugin

A screenshot of the plugin's locaiton in the wordpress settings menuThe plugin's settings are at Settings > News Match Shortcode in the WordPress admin.

When you first enable the plugin, you'll want to configure it with your organization's name, your News Revenue Hub ID, the default donation amount, and the live and staging URLs of your News Revenue Hub form.

The settings is where you configure the donation levels to match your organization's membership levels. While the plugin comes with 4 default donation levels, you can easily define your own labels and donation levels. The defaults are: $0-$5 Friend, $5-$50 Ally, $50-$500 Champion, and $500+ Ambassador. If you want fewer donation levels, set the third level's upper donation amount to a very high amount, such as your org's dream budget, and make sure that the fourth level is more than that.

A screenshot of the level 1 donation level settings.
Here's an example of non-default configuration of the first donation level out of four.

If you use Salesforce to track campaigns, you can set a default Salesforce campaign ID for the plugin in the plugin's settings. This can be overridden on a per-form basis by setting the sf_campaign_id attribute of the shortcode, like so: [newsmatch_donation_form sf_campaign_id="foo" amount="25"]

A screenshot of the WordPress admin dashboard shows the setting for the Salesforce Campaign ID
This is the Salesforce campaign ID setting in the plugin admin.

The shortcode in use

The default form of the shortcode uses buttons to select the donation level:

a screenshot of the donation form
[newsmatch_donation_form]
By adding type="select" to the shortcode, it appears like this:

a screenshot of the dropdown donation form
[newsmatch_donation_form type="select"]
A full list of shortcode arguments and examples can be found in the plugin's WordPress.org entry, but they're basically one-off overrides for your Salesforce campaign ID, your default donation amount, and the type of form.

The above screenshots use the plugin's default styles with non-default configuration. You can style the donation form using your site's theme's CSS, Jetpack’s Custom CSS Editor, or any other tool that allows you to define custom styles on your site. Guidance for these custom styles can be found in the FAQ section of the plugin's WordPress.org entry.

Need support?

If you have questions about this plugin and integrating it with your WordPress site, contact support@inn.org.

If you have questions about the News Revenue Hub, visit their contact page.

If you have questions about the News Match program, visit their website for donornonprofit and funding partner information.

How to use News Match Popup Basics

As part of INN's support for the 2017 News Match campaign, we've released two WordPress plugins to help sites convert readers. News Match Popup Basics provides a little guidance and some useful tools for using popups in your campaigns.

Prefer a video walk through? Watch this tutorial on youtube.

News Match Popup Basics does the following:

  • Creates a new popup with our recommended default settings, using the free Popup Maker plugin
  • Provides a way to disable popups on your donation pages
  • Provides a way to disable popups when readers click a link in your Mailchimp-powered newsletter

Let's walk you through installing the plugin and getting it set up.

Installing the plugin

News Match Popup Basics requires the Popup Maker plugin, so first we need to install that.

On your WordPress site, click on "Plugins" in the Dashboard menu. If you see an "Add New" button at the top of the page, click that.

If you don't see the "Add New" button or the "Plugins" menu, your user might not have permission to manage plugins on the site; you should contact your technical support and ask them to install News Match Popup Basics for you. Your site might require downloading the plugin ZIPs and uploading them via FTP instead of using WordPress' built-in plugin installation tools.

After clicking "Add New" you should be on the "Add Plugins" page. In the "Search plugins..." box, enter "popup maker" — you should see an entry named "Popup Maker™ – Best Rated" appear, by "WP Popup Maker." Click "Install Now" to install the plugin, and then click "Activate". You'll be sent to a page asking you to allow sending certain information to a third party. You can press the "Skip" button without any negative effects. Whether you choose to skip or accept, you'll be taken to the list of Popup Maker popups: none yet exist, and that's okay.

Go back to the "Plugins" page, and inn the "Search plugins..." box, enter "news match popup basics innlabs" and choose the presented popup named "News Match Popup Basics" by "innlabs" — that's our plugin. Install and activate it.

In the Dashboard menu, choose the "Popup Maker" item. This will take you back to the "Popups" page you saw earlier, but there should now be a draft popup named "News Match Default Popup." Click on it.

You'll see an editor page that looks rather like the default WordPress post editor, but with a number of exciting new boxes. You can read more about those boxes at the Popup Maker plugin documentation, which is thorough and well-illustrated.

Our default settings for the popup are these:

  • is not published by default, but requires you to publish it before it becomes active on your site
  • is the size “Large” from Popup Maker’s settings
  • appears at the center of the bottom of the reader’s screen
  • appears by sliding up from the bottom of the screen, over 350 milliseconds
  • has a “Close” button
  • does not prevent readers from interacting with the page by means of an overlay
  • does not have a title
  • automatically opens after 25 seconds on the page, because immediate popup appearances can be jarring
  • once dismissed by a reader, does not appear again for a year or until the reader clears their browser’s cookies, whichever comes first
  • appears on the front page of your site
  • uses Popup Maker’s default theme

You'll need to configure which pages the popup appears on, using the built-in conditionals feature. For disabling the popup on certain pages or in certain cases, read on in this blog post, or check out Popup Maker's paid extensions.

You'll also probably want to review the Popup Maker themes available and modify them to suit your own site's appearances. Once you've modified or created a theme, edit your popup to make it use your theme.

In addition to using Popup Maker themes, you can style popups using your site's WordPress theme's CSS, Jetpack’s Custom CSS Editor, or any other tool that allows you to define custom styles on your site.

What goes in a popup?

We recommend donation forms or newsletter signup forms. For a simple donation form that integrates with the News Match campaign, check out News Match Donation Shortcode.

Finding the News Match Popup Basics settings

From the WordPress Dashboard menu, under Popup Maker, choose "News Match Popup Basics." This is where you configure whether the plugin disables certain popups.

Disabling popups on certain pages

Donation pages should help people give you money, and should have as few obstacles to that goal as possible. Likewise, newsletter signup pages. Strip out ads, remove unnecessary headers, maybe even clean up your footer on these pages. Donation and signup pages should do one thing and do that well.

Popup Maker's free version includes a simple yet powerful Boolean conditionals system that determines on what pages popups appear, but that system only works on a per-popup basis. Preventing popups from appearing on a particular page requires checking every single popup on your site, and modifying their conditions. We've endeavored to make the process simpler.

In the News Match Popup Basics settings, check the box to enable donation page popup prevention, and add some URLs to the box. Each URL must be on its own line. You should remove the protocol from the start of the URL, so that https://example.org/ is entered as example.org/.

A screenshot of the WordPress admin showing the News Match Popup Basics settings page, focused on the URL-based popup suppression feature's settings. The URLS given are example.org/donate/, example.org/newsletter-signup/, and /about/
Example settings for the URL-based popup prevention feature of News Match Popup Basics.

When a visitor goes to a page the URL of which matches one of the entered URLs, News Match Popup Basics will prevent Popup Maker from displaying any popups on that page. You can include URL fragments as well, so if you want to prevent popups on pages that have a common URL name, like every page that has donate in its URL.

Be careful with how general your URL fragments are. By "match" we mean that if the entire text on the line in the box can be found in the URL, it will match:

  • example.org/meow/ will only match example.org/meow/ and example.org/meow/woof/
  • /meow/ will only match example.org/meow/, example.org/meow/woof/ and example.org/2014/03/25/meow/
  • meow will match example.org/meow/, example.org/meow/woof/, example.org/2014/03/25/meow/,
    example.org/2017/10/25/adopt-chairman-meow-adorable/ and
    example.org/category/homeownership/

We named this feature "donation page popup prevention," but in reality it can be used to exclude popups on all sorts of pages.

If you'd like the ability to programmatically exclude popups on arbitrary pages, let us know on this feature proposal on GitHub.

Disabling popups from Mailchimp visitors

In the WordPress Dashboard, under the “Popup Maker” menu item, on the “News Match Popup Basics” page, there is a checkbox that enables MailChimp suppression. There is also a text box to set the utm_source parameter. MailChimp automatically appends this URL parameter to outbound links in your emails if you have click tracking set up.

From one of the emails you have sent, find a link that contains a utm_source= parameter and copy the following argument text, up until any & character, into the text box. For example, a Nerd Alert newsletter sent by INN Labs contained a link that looked like this: https://example.org/?utm_source=Nerd+Alert&utm_campaign=4d4ecd9f68-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1476113985-4d4ecd9f68-421742753. From that URL, you would copy Nerd+Alert into the text box.

A screenshot of the WordPress Admin settings page for News Match Popup Basics, focused on the popup prevention for MailChimp visitors. The setting for utm_source is set to "Nerd+Alert"
An example configuration of the utm_source setting.

Once you have provided a utm_source parameter, checked the checkbox, and saved the settings, any popup that contains an HTML element with an id attribute equal to mc_embed_signup, or a CSS selector equal to #mc_embed_signup, will be suppressed. Suppression works client-side using JavaScript that runs in the visitor’s browser.

If you have multiple MailChimp signup forms on your site, suppression based on the HTML ID of the form will not work for you. You should add a class to all MailChimp forms in popups, and use that as the selector. For more details about this process, see the FAQ entry "Why does MailChimp popup suppression use #mc_embed_signup" at the plugin's WordPress.org entry.

If you'd like better tracking of MailChimp form sign-ups, we recommend that you follow MailChimp's guide on editing forms for better analytics to track popup conversions.

Need help?

If you have questions, join us in our webinar today (Wednesday, October 25) at 1 p.m. Eastern, or contact us at support@inn.org.

Nerd Alert 141: We wish you a merry weekend

We wish you a merry weekend
We wish you a happy weekend
We wish you a restful weekend
And a happy day off ♬

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

Ben: The RNNoise Project is collecting donations of noise to help improve real-time noise suppression algorithms. Record a sample in your browser, review it to make sure that there's nothing sensitive, and submit. It's that easy!

RC: Pierrick Calvez's "A Five Minutes Guide to Better Typography" is a beautifully-laid-out demonstration of its own principles.

Julia: “Want readers to start trusting you? Stop stalking them across the internet,” says Melody Kramer.

Kay: How are you treating your most committed users? You have potential to expand your loyal members/followers/supporters and you can start with talking to them like they matter.

Inndy: Other robots are calling you, and it’s because the Do Not Call list has a big hole in it.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Listen up!

The News Match logo is plain text that reads: News Match. Quality Journalism Matters.

News Match is back, and our team is working to help participating organizations take advantage of this unique and impactful opportunity. Read more about how we can help, and check back here every week for updates. We’ll be posting plugin release announcements, how-tos for configuring donation forms, best practices for user experience design, and advice on maximizing Google Analytics for donation campaigns. You won’t want to miss it.

EVENTS/DEADLINES

Be in the know

October 6: Last day to apply for Catalyst AAJA’s Media Entrepreneurship Program
October 13-14: Computation and Journalism Symposium 2017 at Northwestern University
October 14: Last day to apply to participate in the Washington News Nerds’ Tacoma (un)conference
November 3: Deadline for proposals for Propublica’s Local Reporting Network
December 1-3: WordCamp US in Nashville
December 7-8: SRCCON:WORK in Philadelphia

SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

A graph showing the percent of Puerto Rican power customers who have service. It starts below 5% and slowly grows to 10.7%.

When FEMA removed drinking water and power statistics from its page covering Puerto Rico's recovery, The Washington Post started graphing those stats. And FEMA started posting those stats again.

The Financial Times has created an eye-opening game based on real reporting, including interviews with dozens of Uber drivers, that shines a light on the realities of working in the gig economy. You're an Uber driver. Can you make your mortgage payment?

Do you develop or maintain database-reliant interactive websites? How will they be preserved for the future? Katherine Boss at New York University Libraries, and Meredith Broussard at the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute are conducting a survey of news apps, to help figure out what the best ways to archive such projects are.

GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

NPR is hiring a product designer.

The Center for Public Integrity is hiring a news developer.

St. Louis Public Radio is hiring a digital engagement producer and a bunch of other positions.

Poynter has a massive roundup of journalism internships and fellowships.

If you're looking for general jobs in nonprofit news, check out the main INN newsletter and sign up here to get it in your inbox every Tuesday. Two INN newsletters are better than one!

DISCOVER

Gather ye rosebuds

READ: Wordways, an open-access journal dedicated to "recreational logology."

LISTEN: It’s Halloween Month, but if you don’t want to listen to the Otomatone cover of Spooky Scary Skeletonscheck out The Guardian's list of the best 50 tracks from September. 🎶

PLAY: Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing meets Asteroids in Ztype.

WATCH: Three hours and 47 minutes of live YouTube comments being fed into a shredder.

EAT: Overnight sous-vide bacon.

DRINK: Pumpkin beverages — including ones without pumpkin spice!


It’s been a tough week. You survived!

The Pokémon Staryu floats against a blue background with motion-blurred purple and white stripes. From its central gem, endless streams of stars pour towards the viewer.

You get a star!