Pre-populate external website form

Question

Hi,

I have a donation form which users fill out and I would like to then send the user to the charities own website with their information already filled in. Is this possible?

thanks

Answer 1

This is a big part of what my company does....but we have to rely on the client as well. It could be a great exercise for both you and them.

Here's the basic idea. We take a web form entry from a site. We have a script that processes the information and decides where to route the info (we do this for quite a few different clients) Then the system goes through logic for each individual site (functions in a class) that tells it how to pass the information over. In some cases, it's simply an email to a person. In other cases, we CURL a string over that the recipient site has been setup to accept. One site allows us to directly post to a "hidden" page on their site....this doesn't seem the most secure option to me, though. The key is to negotiate with the partner how they'd like to receive the information. If you're helping them get donors, I suspect they'll be willing to do anything they can to help.

Be aware, there could be some security issues with trying to forward donation information across sites....you'll want to remain as secure as humanly possible....and personally, I don't think I'd ever transmit something like a credit card number except to a processor via SSL.

I was a non-profit webmaster for quite a few years, and still have several non-profit sites I consult with. There's systems out there just for this purpose (one that comes to mind is network for good) Also, I've seen groups build non-profits specifically to accept donations on behalf of other non-profits. Point being, there's many different ways to approach this task, not all of them even code related.