Yum, it's a cookie

With some creativity and the use of standard front-end code, a bland online survey can be sweetened and transformed into an engaging, interactive, and shareable quiz that keeps advocates energized around a cause.

Our client Share Our Strength engages constituents online using Convio fundraising software in service of their mission to end childhood hunger in America.

Convio has a handy set of tools and can wrangle lots of data in meaningful ways on the backend, but creating a default survey experience for constituents can leave nonprofit advocates and donors hungry for a little bit more. We at Donordigital worked with Share Our Strength to create a quiz experience that would offer all the bells and whistles to deeply engage people with Share Our Strength's mission.

When Share Our Strength released It's Dinnertime: A Report on Low-Income Families' Efforts to Plan, Shop for and Cook Healthy Meals, we worked together to create this short "Cooking Matters" quiz with the goal of increasing mission awareness and promoting the report.

During the implementation for this quiz, which is a survey that is built on top of the Convio platform, we encountered several desired features that we couldn't quite make happen with the features in Convio. One example is the lack of a straightforward way to score the quiz in order to give the constituent immediate feedback.

So we turned to a more front-end approach and created a few cookies on the quiz page, in order to read those cookies and do more fun stuff with them on the thank you page. Then, on the survey thank-you page, we were able to score the quiz, highlight the answers, create some dynamic sharing features, and, generally, sweeten up the user experience.

Here is a quick cookie recipe, if you'd like to try this yourself at home:

Convio Quiz Cookie Recipe:

  • Include a javascript function to createCookie() on the quiz page (this is the best resource I've found to date on implementing cookies).
  • Call the createCookie() function to set a cookie when a quiz answer is selected. It looks kind of like this on a survey question in Convio:
  • Include a javascript function to readCookie() on the thank you page of the quiz.
  • Define some variables on the thank you page and read the cookies. That looks like this:
  • Use the javascript variables to add up scores, display answers, create dynamic share descriptions, etc.
  • To view the code (you can—since it's front-end code), take the quiz and see what's happening when you view > source in any web browser.
  • Enjoy!

Jesse Kelsey is a Web Developer at Donordigital, and will be speaking at NTEN's upcoming (April 2013) Nonprofit Technology Conference in Minneapolis, MN. Look for his session, called "C is for Cookie: Convio Platform Townhall."