New Media Campaigns Blog

How a Tweet Led to Us Working With Our Alma Mater

Alex Pomer — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:25:00 -0400

All of New Media Campaigns' founders went to UNC Chapel Hill, we're located in Carrboro, NC and the company got its start through a program for startups that is put on by UNC's Entrepreneurship Minor. It's no surprise then, that the majority of our team are big fans of UNC Sports and as a result, follow UNC Sports accounts on Twitter.

That's why when we saw that Tar Heel Monthly (THM) tweeted about offering basketball tickets in exchange for a new website, we jumped at the opportunity!

We knew we'd be a great fit to work with THM because we've worked with so many UNC-related organizations and we personally fit into THM's target audience so we could really hone in on what UNC fans would want out of THM's website.

@TarHeelMonthly We're local, we're alums, and we would be excited to help.
— New Media Campaigns (@nmcteam) October 19, 2011

Soon after replying to THM's initial Tweet, we got an email to our sales team from Adam Lucas and began discussing how THM could improve upon their current site, which existed primarily as a place where you could order subscriptions online to THM. As you can see, there was a lot of room for improvement!

THM wanted a place where they could post older issues of their magazine and also a place that UNC fans would go during games, whether they were at home, in a bar or at the stadium. We were definitely up to the challenge, agreed to work together, and immediately went to work brainstorming ways that we could transform their current site into something UNC fans would want to go to on a regular basis.

The New Tar Heel Monthly Website Design:

A newsfeed to keep visitors returning to the site frequently

Fans want to know all about what their sports teams are up to so we needed a news feed that covered many different aspects of news about UNC sports. The homepage features a filterable news feed of the following different types of UNC news:

Tweets from @TarHeelMonthly
Stories from THM Daily, the new blog of Tar Heel Monthly
What We're Reading, a feed of articles across the web that the THM staff is reading
Tweets from a select group of UNC Athletes so visitors can get a better feel for the personalities of UNC athletes

What We're Reading

We built a custom tool so that the THM staff can install a bookmarket in their browser and any time they're reading an interesting article online about UNC spots, they can click the bookmarklet, add a short description of the article, click share, and the article is sent directly to the new THM homepage newsfeed, sidebar feed, and Gameday page.

We liked the feature so much that we decided to create a What We're Reading for our own site to share articles relating to web design!

The Gameday Page

As UNC fans, we knew that on the day of big games is when we read the most about UNC sports so we decided to build an area of the new site specifically dedicated to what's going on across the web about that day's game. The Gameday page features:

A feed of stories that the THM staff is reading on the day of the game
A feed of tweets with the hashtag #uncgameday
A form where visitors can suggest questions for THM writers to ask to players in post-game interviews.

Tar Heel Monthly Daily Blog

THM may be a monthly print magazine but we wanted the new site to be a destination that visitors want to visit every day. The old THM site was very stagnant and there wasn't a good place for the writers to display their talents. The THM Daily blog gives the staff another venue to ensure the site is updated frequently, which gives search engines more content to index and will greatly help with search engine rankings in the long term. The style of the blog was kept simple, similar to ESPN's Grantland, to keep the focus on the content.

A Responsive Design

Because the site was built to be enjoyed wherever UNC fans are, whether that's on their desktop at work, their iPad on the couch, or their phone on the go, we knew the new site would need to be optimized for a variety of screen sizes. As a result, we built a responsive design so that visitors get the information they're looking for, no matter where they're viewing the site.

Online Advertising

A site with the potential to be a major news source for UNC athletics will drive enough traffic to make advertising on the site a nice way to generate some additional revenue. The site was built so that THM staff can easily control up to four banner ad placements on the site through the content management system.

A Call to Action to Subscribe

While we kept the site's audience in mind throughout the entire design process, we never forgot what the purpose of the site is, to encourage people to subscribe to the print magazine. There's a readily available subscribe button on every page of the site so anyone who comes to the site to enjoy any of its other features is always just one click away from beginning the subscription process.

The Results

The site just launched but on its first day, the site had twice as many visitors as it typically gets in an average month. The majority of that traffic was to articles on the blog so as THM continues to write new posts, the traffic should continue to increase.

In addition to putting together a great website for THM, we also got to collaborate with a staff whose work we admire (and read regularly) and they were an absolute joy to work with.

Take a second and have a look at the new website and if you have a cool story about how you got to work with an especially fun client through social media, we'd love to hear your story in the comments!

A Beautiful jQuery GitHub Widget

Joel Sutherland — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:35:00 -0400

At New Media Campaigns, we love GitHub. For those that aren't familiar, Git is version control software for programmers. GitHub is a service that provides Git hosting and related services. The developers here all use GitHub for their personal and open source projects and as a company we use it for our custom development projects.

Since we are website builders, we tend to build separate websites or write blog posts about our projects. (An example is Josh's Slim PHP Framework). We thought it would be great to be able to embed a snapshot of the project using GitHub's API, much like it is possible to pull in latest tweets from Twitter's API.

We couldn't find a good widget that we liked, so we built our own. It's really easy to use. You just add the following html anywhere you want it to appear:

<div class="github-widget" data-repo="JoelSutherland/GitHub-jQuery-Repo-Widget"></div>

Then you include the script file somewhere after you've included jQuery:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.githubRepoWidget.min.js"></script>

This automatically handles the CSS styling as well by adding a script tag into the head of the document. This makes it really easy to add to page since there are no other dependencies. Also, the container is fluid so it fills whatever width is available.

Feel free to use and improve it! At the top of the post is a screenshot of the widget, but here at the bottom is the real thing. Click through to get to the GitHub project.

Extending the life of your content

Claire Atwell — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:00:00 -0400

One of the most important factors of Search Engine Optimization is regularly posting good content on your website. But a list of your favorite TV shows or what you ate for breakfast isn’t exactly ideal. In a perfect world, you should be consistently creating compelling content that is relevant to your target audience and optimized for keywords you’d like to rank highly for.

But realistically, coming up with something brand-new to post to your blog every week can be a huge time burden, especially when your primary concern is to serve your customers. So, why not extend the life of content you already have? These can be articles you’ve written for other publications, marketing materials your company uses or presentations from talks or seminars.

Here’s a recent example of some content repurposing we did for one of our clients we help with SEO, the Raleigh business and intellectual property law firm Whitmeyer Tuffin, PLLC., which produced some very successful results.

1. It started with a lecture.

Randy Whitmeyer often lectures to classes at local universities on intellectual property law. Such was the case a few weeks ago, when Randy spoke to Dr. Ted Baker’s entrepreneurship students at N.C. State. Naturally, he put together a powerpoint presentation to accompany his talk covering intellectual property basics for entrepreneurs.

2. The presentation was uploaded to slideshare...

Rather than file it away for the next lecture, we added his presentation to the Whitmeyer Tuffin slideshare account so the information could be viewed and shared easily. The firm uses slideshare fairly frequently to publish presentations, which are then added to their website. Not only do these slides inform current and potential clients, it also establishes the Whitmeyer Tuffin attorneys as thought leaders in their industry.

3. And repurposed into a blog post..

Extracting and tweaking the information from this particular presentation would create more SEO value for their website than just embedding the slideshare. So, we used the biggest takeaway points to write an optimized blog post, the Top 10 Intellectual Property Mistakes Made by Emerging Companies. Because Randy had already put thought in to the presentation, it wasn't difficult or time-consuming to recycle the information from the slides for the website.

4. Which was submitted to directories and shared on Twitter.

To get the most out of any content you post, it should be promoted across the web to drive traffic back to the site and (hopefully) generate a few external links. This is usually pretty successful for an interesting, informative post such as this one, particularly when shared in the right places. The blog post became the subject of a Whitmeyer Tuffin tweet, and was submitted to several directories geared toward entrepreneurs.

5. The result?

The post was viewed hundreds of times in the first five days after being shared, and is now the second-most viewed page on the site (after the homepage.) The post’s link on the Startups subreddit drove 136 new visits alone. Overall, traffic to the Whitmeyer Tuffin site has more than doubled since last month, primarily due to directory referrals. The post is also ranking on the first page of Google for intellectual property mistakes.

This is just one example of how content that's already been created can be recycled into a successful website post. Where are some other places you look for site content to repurpose?

5 Tips for Writing Effective Meta Descriptions (and why they matter)

Claire Atwell — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Think back to the last time you picked up a book at a bookstore or the library. Chances are, you took a moment to flip it over and read the back cover before deciding whether or not it was worthwhile. Meta descriptions, found inside the <head> element in the HTML, are essentially the ‘back cover’ of a web page. They give search engines and potential site visitors a concise explanation of the content on the site. Meta description tags, as well as title and meta keyword tags, form a group of elements known collectively as metadata.

While meta descriptions do not directly factor in to your page’s search engine rankings, they do play a significant role in a page’s SEO. Writing relevant and accurate meta descriptions will increase your site’s click-through-rate from search engines, as they are often used as the description of your page when it appears in search results (and in links on social media sites like Facebook or Google+.)

Take a look at these beginner tips for improving your site’s meta descriptions to see if you’re getting the most out of your metadata!

1. Don’t overlook them

This may seem self-explanatory, but it’s easy for meta descriptions to land on the “nice-to-have” list when preparing a site for launch (since they don’t actually factor in to the algorithm used by most search engines for ranking websites.) Writing effective meta descriptions is neither difficult nor particularly time-consuming, and making the effort to create them will pay off exponentially for your site’s search engine presence.

2. Make them compelling, concise and informative

You may come across sites in search results with one keyword phrase in the description, repeated over and over again. It might even appear IN ALL CAPS!! Even with the best intentions, searchers and search engines view these descriptions as spam, and will avoid your site altogether. An ideal meta description should read as a brief, engaging sentence. It’s meant to grab a searcher's attention, spark interest in what's on the page and encourage a searcher to find out more by clicking on the site (while keeping the exclamation marks to a minimum.)

3. Keep them between 150 and 160 characters

Without a defined meta description tag, search engines will find text in the content of the page for the description (which may or may not be a good representation of your site.) Additionally, this filler text will get snipped at around 160 characters, which could make it unclear. Keeping your meta description between 150 and 160 characters will ensure that you maximize the space available and avoid having your text cut off.

4. Utilize (but don’t abuse) important keywords

Google (and most other major search engines) will bold search queries in the title and description of websites that appear in the search results. Because of this, it’s a good idea to incorporate targeted keywords (and your location, if relevant) in to your meta descriptions - if a word or phrase in your description matches the original search, the bold terms will likely catch the eye of the searcher.

5. Create unique descriptions

Another tactic website owners will sometimes use is to Copy+Paste the same description for every page across the entire website. While meta descriptions can’t help your page rank, duplicate content can certainly hurt it. Go through each page and write a completely unique description based on the content on that page, not what the entire website has to offer. If you have similar pages (such as a separate page for each product you sell,) create a formula to systematically craft unique descriptions because on product name, brand or color.

Many of today’s content management systems will automatically generate meta descriptions for each page based on its content. HiFi also gives users the option to edit the description, as the well as the title tag, for increased customization. What are the things you’ve found helpful when writing meta descriptions?

How NMC Shares Good Web Reads with Each Other

Joel Sutherland — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:55:57 -0500

Everyone at NMC keeps up-to-date on our industry through reading articles around the web. Each team member has some system they've refined that usually involves some mix of RSS, industry blogs and aggregators like Hacker News for finding the latest and greatest web-related news.

Last week, during the height of the current Pinterest frenzy, we thought it would be cool to build a board where we all shared the most interesting articles we came across. It would be fun to see what everyone else at the office was reading and would help bake in some institutional knowledge since we may be reading things that are relevant to others on the team. We thought it would also be fun to make that public to let clients, prospects, and friends follow what we're reading. So, we built the "What We're Reading" page. It's an NMC curated list of the best web-agency news out there.

To make it easy for the whole team to use, we spent a couple of hours and built a super-simple bookmarklet that uses the HiFi API. A bookmarklet is a bookmark button that runs a script:

We all installed this on our browser and whenever we're reading an article that is worth sharing, we click the button and get a nice popup:

This pre-populates the description with whatever text we had selected and also finds the largest images on the page so that it's easy to include those in the post. Once you hit submit, it's sent to HiFi and posted to the site. Using it is super-easy.

The list can be sorted by different filters, letting each person focus on what is most interesting to them. We're excited to share our reading list with everyone, but probably more excited to use it ourselves! Check it out and let us know your thoughts!

Using Infographics with Political Campaign Websites

Clay Schossow — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0500

An online marketing tactic that has really taken hold over the past few years has been creating and promoting infographics. It's a great way to visually convey a complex issue and people really love these graphics, making infographics effective tools at getting links built into your site and having it shared through social media. In the past, NMC has even created our own and blogged about the great marketing results from infographics.

While non-profits and corporations (especially startups) have been the biggest users of this technique, I've noticed that very few political campaigns have hopped in the fray. Media organizations have used infographics to complement their coverage of politics, but the actual campaigns have not created their own interactive infographics for visitors.

The Obama campaign and administration has been noticeably different, creating infographics and posting them to the campaign site and even the official White House site. This tactic makes perfect sense for campaigns and it is one that we frequently recommend to campaigns. Below are some reasons why infographics and political websites are a great fit together.

Leaving a lasting image in the minds of voters. The image in this post is the Obama campaign's latest infographic, showing the number of jobs created over the past three years. It demonstrates the value making this data into a graphic -- any visitor can instantly see the upward trend in job creation over the past year, which is exactly what the campaign wants you to take away from the date. It's infinitely easier to quickly convey this message through a graphic than making someone sort through a table of figures. Visitors who see this image, leave the site with it implanted in their minds.

Easy to share with others and embed on sites. An infographic is easy and fun to share with others. The campaign makes it even easier by having prominent links that let people Facebook, Tweet, or Email the infographic to their own networks. Similarly, the campaign also gives an embed code that lets bloggers and journalists insert the graphic onto their own site. By giving people the power to share and embed, an infographic lets a campaign shape and control a story. No numbers will get mistyped and it won't be selectively quoted, your exact message will be sent out to people. Similarly, people are much more excited to share the news on their own blogs and social profiles when there's an attractive image attached to it; supporters are much more likely to send this out to their friends than a bland report. In this specific case, the campaign has even gone one step farther by allowing visitors to turn the graphic into a virtual postcard that they can share with friends.

Repurpose for ads, email blasts, and presentations. The graphics can also be extended outside of the website to different supporting materials and even other media. An infographic can be used as the centerpiece of an email blast or as a display ad to push people to the page. The image can also be repurposed for presentations and mail pieces in the future, allowing the dividends of creating the graphic to be reaped far into the future. With a text-heavy blog post or report, you're limited with what you can incorporate into a punchy ad or email, but the infographic neatly wraps it into a pretty package.

Build in valuable links to the campaign website. As the graphic gets shared around the web by supporters and media, the links built into the site will help greatly with SEO, which is an underrated element of online campaigns. An infographic makes it much more likely that people sharing the campaign's information will build a link back to the campaign website rather than just pulling out quotes like they could with a blog post.

Overall, infographics are an easy and engaging tool that campaigns can use to present information to voters and then benefit from all of the sharing and linking that follows.

10 Common Mistakes Political Campaigns Make with Facebook Pages

Tyler Pearson — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:38:33 -0500

1. Not promoting it

The first tip is super-straightforward, but it is so important yet so often overlooked that it is worth mentioning first. Once you create a Facebook page it needs to be promoted for voters and supporters to ever find it. Add a link to the page wherever you can online, including the campaign website, Twitter account, and Youtube video descriptions. Additionally, promote the page offline in places like on direct mail, campaign literature, TV ads, and in a candidate’s stump speeches.

Targeting Facebook ads to voters and potential supporters can also be tremendously cost-effective, so use some of the money budgeted for online ads (you are, right?) to promote the page.

2. Setting up a personal profile for a campaign

This is very basic, but I still see many campaigns get this wrong. Campaigns should be using a page, not a personal profile for a candidate.

3. Having both a personal profile and a page for a candidate

It’s the year 2012 and most people are on Facebook, including many candidates. Additionally, many candidates have been on Facebook for years now and accumulated quite a few friends. So the question often pops up on what should be done with a personal profile while a campaign is going on. It's best to simply hide the personal one through the duration of the campaign so voters don’t get confused trying to decide which place to connect.

4. Neglecting to set up a vanity Facebook url (and as soon as possible)

As soon as a page hits a certain level of “likes” (currently 25), a personalized url can be set up for the page that makes it much easier to remember. For instance, the default url for your page will look something like: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bob-Smithford/143854752232314.

A personalized Facebook url allows it to be a much simpler: http://www.facebook.com/bobsmithford.

Also, while this isn’t always possible, ideally this should be the same as your domain and usernames for every social network you are on. For example, take the Obama campaign: the domain name is barackobama.com, the Facebook url is facebook.com/barackobama, the Twitter username is @barackobama, and the Youtube username is BarackObama. Keeping a name the same across platforms makes it much easier for supporters to find the pages.

5. Promoting a page on print and TV with just an icon instead of a url

On the web you can simply click an icon and it will take you to the website -- but you can’t do this with a postcard or TV ad, so including a url is import so supporters can find a candidate’s Facebook page.

In the same way that you wouldn’t add an icon of a website and tell people to go there without mentioning the url, don't only add a Facebook icon and expect people to find it on their own. Use the personalized url set up for your page and include that on any print or video pieces the campaign puts out.

6. Never looking at Facebook Insights

I’ve often found campaigns don’t realize the wealth of information they have access to through the Insights tab on a for the Facebook page. There a wide range of data that can provide insights things like:

the demographic makeup of those who “like” a page
the best times for posting and the most interacted with type of posts
the number of people reached through a post
number of interactions with a post
how many times a Facebook page has been viewed

7. Not setting up a custom landing tab

Facebook allows a tab other than the wall to be designated as the first tab visitors will see that visit a Facebook page and are not yet fans. Facebook also gives us the ability to customize a tab specifically how we want it. By combining these two options, campaigns have a great opportunity to convert interested voters into supporters and supporters into donors, volunteers, and more. By default, visitors are shown the wall of a page.

As an example, take a look at how Mitt Romney's landing tab is currently set up. While there is more to it than is probably necessary, it includes valuable elements like an email signup, donation call to action, and more information for voters on why Romney should be President.

Another example is the signup shown on Elizabeth Warren's Facebook page:

8. Auto-posting tweets to Facebook

Facebook and Twitter may both be social networks, but both are different from each other in how best to use them. Many campaigns are tempted to autopost tweets from a campaign Twitter account to a Facebook page (or vice versa), but doing doing so removes the ability to customize messaging for the platform.

There many reasons not to do this, but here are a few:

Facebook allows more characters than Twitter, so it makes sense to take advantage of that and use when necessary
Facebook gives users the ability to attach links, videos, and picture with a status update. This is lost when autoposting
It looks lazy to voters
There's a good chance a campaign will not notice and consequently not respond to any comments people may leave on the Facebook update
It's much more likely that you will inadvertently barrage users with too many status updates because Twitter is set up for more frequent updates than Facebook

9. Using the Facebook page to dump press releases and official statements

Keep the press releases and official statements to the reporters and customize your message with a more personal feel for people on Facebook. Press releases are boring, so resist the urge to directly post these to a page. If you do, don't expect fans to actually want to read what is posted. Instead post pictures, videos, and shorter messages that people will actually look at.

Compare North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue’s Facebook page to Florida Governor Rick Scott’s Facebook page. Which do you find more interesting?

10. Adding the position sought to the candidate’s Facebook page title

This is something I know other people disagree with, but I strongly believe that the title for a Facebook page should only be the candidate’s name and nothing more. For example, use “Frank Miller” instead of “Frank Miller for Springfield City Council” because once Frank Miller gets elected, he will want to keep using the Facebook page but the “for Springfield City Council” will no longer be correct. Alternatively, if Frank loses and runs for mayor in two years, the previous page will no longer be able to be used and the campaign will have to start from scratch again.

Facebook doesn’t allow changing a page title if there are over 100 likes, and it’s an awful feeling when you realize the page you worked hard to build to hundreds or thousands of fans is no longer able to be used because the title is incorrect. Keep it simple and stick with solely the candidate’s name -- in the long run you will be glad.

Unveiling our New Case Study Format

Joel Sutherland — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:38:29 -0500

We've always really liked the way the portfolio section of our website works. Even though we've redesigned our site several times over the years, we've kept the same layout and functionality: a grid of thumbnails that can be filtered by category. This works well because it is easy for prospective clients to find work we've done that interests or is relevant to them. Additionally, the large body of work demonstrates our experience across a wide variety of projects.

Where it falls short is in showing the detailed approach we take to every project we do. To paint a clearer picture of the way we work on projects, we're now writing up some of them as case studies. These give a better picture of our process and the thought that goes into each aspect of the site development process. Additionally, each one contains a beautiful photo (thanks to @markitos57) of the website in action.

Ciao Italia

North Carolina's Southeast

Ward and Smith

Recap of "Functional Programming" talk at Triangle JS/PHP/MySQL Meetup

Kris Jordan — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:54:47 -0500

Last night I had the pleasure of giving a talk on 'Functional Programming' techniques in JavaScript and PHP with an emphasis on the popular libraries underscore.js and underscore.php. The event was the annual joint gathering of the TriangleJS and Triangle PHP/MySQL Meetups.

We started out with some coverage of why functional programming is compelling to learn and what exactly it is. Functional programming, at its roots, is the idea that functions are values so they can be assigned to variables, passed to other functions as arguments, and returned from functions as return values. We looked at some examples of each which are best illustrated in the slide deck linked and embedded below. We hit on some of the facilities provided by the underscore library. Finally, the conclusion of the talk was a live coding session (with only one syntactical error! thank the Live Coding Gods) where we started fleshing out a little, functional SQL-like DSL for querying data in-memory.

Overall it was a great time and I really appreciate the TriJS / TriPHP&MySQL groups for putting the event together!

Slides are available on SpeakerDeck. Demo code is available on GitHub.

Accept campaign donations with the NGP contribution API

Josh Lockhart — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:25:20 -0500

UPDATE: This article is a follow-up to an earlier article on our blog about the NGP contribution API written by Eli Van Zoeren. We have since updated the code we use to integrate with NGP's contribution API. Our newest code is explained in this article.

New Media Campaigns works with many political clients that use the robust NGP fundraising and contact management platform. Unfortunately, the NGP donation API has proven a tough nut to crack due to sparse documentation. However, we’ve written a PHP class that makes it super easy to integrate with the NGP donation API so you can avoid the hassle and start accepting political campaign donations right away.

Using the NgpDonation class

The NGP donation API exposes a SOAP web service that consumes an XML request and returns an XML response. Our NgpDonation PHP class provides a human-friendly wrapper around the NGP SOAP API. Accepting contributions with the NGP donation API has never been easier.

Require the NgpDonation class

First, require the NgpDonation PHP class into your PHP script:

require 'NgpDonation.php';

Instantiate the NgpDonation class

Next, create an instance of NgpDonation. The class constructor accepts three arguments:

Your API credentials string provided by NGP.
A true or false value that will send or not send email notifications to the donor upon receipt.

An associative array of donation fields (see full list).

$d = new NgpDonation('your-credentials', true, array(
    'FirstName' => 'John',
    'LastName' => 'Doe',
    'Address1' => '100 Elm Street',
    'Zip' => '12345',
    'Cycle' => '2012',
    'Amount' => '50.00',
    'CreditCardNumber' => '4111111111111111',
    'ExpYear' => '13',
    'ExpMonth' => '05'
));

The NGP API requires that you provide at least these fields (case-sensitive) to collect a donation:

FirstName
LastName
Address1
Zip
Cycle
Amount
CreditCardNumber
ExpYear
ExpMonth

A list of all donation fields and field descriptions is available below.

Process Donation

Finally, accept and process the donation like this:

$result = $d->save();

The $result variable will be a boolean value indicating success or failure. If $result is false, you should inspect the NgpDonation instance for reasons why the donation failed.

Error Handling

Missing Fields or Transaction Errors

If you were unable to accept a donation, you may be missing required fields or the credit card may have been declined. Check for errors like this:

if ( $d->hasErrors() ) {
    $errors = $d->getErrors();
}

The $errors variable will be a one-dimensional array of error messages. Usually, this array will indicate that several required fields are empty or missing.

SOAP Fault

There may also be an error with the SOAP API itself. In this scenario, a SoapFault exception will be thrown and caught by your NgpDonation instance. You can check for and inspect the SoapFault exception like this:

if ( $d->hasFault() ) {
    $fault = $d->getFault();
}

In this example, $fault will be an instance of SoapFault that you may inspect as needed.

Inspect the API response

If all else fails, you can inspect the XML response from the NGP API with the NgpDonation instance’s getResult() method. This will return a SimpleXMLElement object.

$result = $d->getResult();
var_dump($result);

Example

HTML Form

<form action="" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8">
    <p>
        <label for="FirstName">First Name</label>
        <input type="text" 
                  id="FirstName"
                  name="donation[FirstName]"
                  value=""
                  required/>
    </p>
    <p>
        <label for="LastName">Last Name</label>
        <input type="text" 
                  id="LastName"
                  name="donation[LastName]"
                  value=""
                  required/>
    </p>
    <p>
        <label for="Address1">Address</label>
        <input type="text"
                  id="Address1"
                  name="donation[Address1]"
                  value=""
                  required/>
    </p>
    <p>
        <label for="Zip">Zip Code</label>
        <input type="text"
                  id="Zip"
                  name="donation[Zip]"
                  value=""
                  required/>
    </p>
    <p>
        <label>Amount</label>
        <input type="radio" 
                  name="donation[Amount]"
                  value="100"/> $100<br/>
        <input type="radio"
                  name="donation[Amount]"
                  value="500"/> $500<br/>
        <input type="radio"
                  name="donation[Amount]"
                  value="1000"/> $1000
    </p>
    <p>
        <label for="CreditCardNumber">Credit Card Number</label>
        <input type="text"
                  id="CreditCardNumber"
                  name="donation[CreditCardNumber]"
                  value=""
                  required/>
    </p>
    <p>
        <label>Credit Card Expiration</label>
        <select name="donation[ExpMonth]" required>
            <option value="01">01 - January</option>
            <option value="02">02 - February</option>
            <option value="03">03 - March</option>
            <option value="04">04 - April</option>
            <option value="05">05 - May</option>
            <option value="06">06 - June</option>
            <option value="07">07 - July</option>
            <option value="08">08 - August</option>
            <option value="09">09 - September</option>
            <option value="10">10 - October</option>
            <option value="11">11 - November</option>
            <option value="12">12 - December</option>
        </select>
        <select name="donation[ExpYear]" required>
            <option value="12">2012</option>
            <option value="13">2013</option>
            <option value="14">2014</option>
        </select>
    </p>
    <p>
        <input type="hidden" name="donation[Cycle]" value="2012"/>
        <input type="submit" value="Donate Now"/>
    </p>
</form>

PHP Script

<?php
require 'NgpDonation.php';
$donation = new NgpDonation('credentials', true, $_POST['donation']);
if ( $donation->save() ) {
    echo "Thank you for your donation!";
} else {
    if ( $donation->hasErrors() ) {
        $errors = $donation->getErrors();
        //Show errors to user
    } else if ($donation->hasFault() ) {
        $fault = $donation->getFault();
        //Log SoapFault for review
    } else {
        $result = $donation->getResult();
        //Log API response for review
    }
}
?>

NGP Donation Fields

This is a comprehensive list of all possible donation fields you may use to accept donations with NGP’s API. Required fields are shown in red.

Contributor Fields

LastName: String. The last name of the donor
FirstName: String. The first name of the donor
MiddleName: String. The middle name of the donor
Prefix: String. A prefix for the donor’s name (e.g. “Mrs.”)
Suffix: String. A suffix for the donor’s name (e.g “Ph.D”)
Address1: String. The donor’s street address
Address2: String. The donor’s street address continued
Address3: String. The donor’s street address continued
City: String. The donor’s city
State: String. The two-letter abbreviation of the donor’s state or region
Zip: String. The donor’s five-digit zip code
Salutation: String. The donor’s salutation
Email: String. The donor’s email address
HomePhone: String. The donor’s home phone number
WorkPhone: String. The donor’s work phone number
WorkExtension: String. The donor’s work phone number extension
FaxPhone: String. The donor’s fax number
Employer: String. The donor’s employer name
Occupation: String. The donor’s occupation
OptIn: Boolean. Should this donor receive future emails about the fundraising campaign?
Organization: String. The donor’s organization

Contribution Fields

Cycle: String. The fundraising campaign’s year cycle (e.g. “2012”)
Member: String.
Attribution: String.
Source: String.
RecurringContrib: Boolean. Will this be a recurring contribution?
RecurringContribNote: String. A note about this recurring contribution
Amount: Float. The amount of the contribution
Attend: String.
RecurringPeriod: String. The frequency on which total recurring contributions will be processed. Options are: MONT, WEEK, BIWK, FRWK, QTER, SMYR, YEAR
RecurringTerm: Integer. The total number of recurring donations

Payment Fields

CreditCardNumber: String. The donor’s credit card number
ExpYear: String. The donor’s two-digit credit card expiration year
ExpMonth: String. The donor’s two-digit credit card expiration month
CVV: String. The donor’s credit card number security code

Download

Our `NgpDonation` class is released under the MIT Public License.

Download the NgpDonation class