Gravity Forms Progress Meter

Overview

If you’ve ever done any type of fundraising, you know how powerful an incentive a progress meter can be. From physical manifestations like the office canned food drive’s barrel to digital solutions like GoFundMe’s progress meter, these tell your potential donators how much money you plan to raise and how close to the goal you currently are. Knowing the current progress of a project encourages people to donate and creates a feedback loop to keep those donations flowing.

We have built a plugin to add a progress meter to your Gravity Forms for tracking donations and form submissions. You set the goal and it will automatically track the number of submissions. If you collect payments via the form, it can track the amount of money collected. It can even count the quantity of products sold.

Styling for the progress meter is inspired by Gravity Forms 2.5. We love the look and feel of the new progress meter for multi-page forms, and we want to keep that experience consistent with our progress meter.

1. Overview
2. Using the Plugin
   1. Prerequisites
   2. Using the Shortcode
      1. Progress Meter With Goal
      2. Currency Goals
      3. Custom Labels
         1. Combine with Currency Goals
      4. Count Values in a Field
   3. Parameters
3. Summary

Using the Plugin

Prerequisites

Confirm that you have Gravity Forms installed and activated and that you’ve installed and activated the plugin.

Using the Shortcode

Gravity Forms Progress Meter adds additional parameters to the [gravityforms]shortcode. Using these parameters, you can activate and customize the progress meter to meet your needs. Let’s step through the different configurations.

Progress Meter With Goal

Add the Progress Meter to your form by setting the action parameter to meter and adding a goal value to the [gravityforms].

[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" goal="75"]

This will generate a progress meter at the top of your form with a goal of 75 form submissions.

Currency Goals

If your goal is a specific currency amount and your form collects payment using a Gravity Forms Add-On such as PayPal or Stripe, you can count the payment amount instead of the number of submissions by adding the field parameter to the shortcode and setting its value to payment_amount.

[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" field="payment_amount" goal="75"]

The progress meter will increment based on the amount spent after a payment has been processed. If the payment method has delayed processing, such as often the case with PayPal, then the count won’t increase until payment is finalized.

Custom Labels

Gravity Forms Progress Meter supports custom labels for both the submission count and the goal, using the count_label and goal_label parameters. Here’s an example where we replace both.

[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" count_label="Donations %d" goal_label="Goal %d" goal="75"]

Note the %d within the parameter value. The plugin uses this know where to insert the submission count and goal count.

Combine with Currency Goals

If you combine custom labels with Currency Goals, you can track the amount spent and display it above your form, similar to what you see on Kickstarter and GoFundMe.

[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" field="2.3" goal="25"]

[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" field="payment_amount" count_label="Donations $%d" goal_label="Goal $%d" goal="1000"]

Count Values in a Field

Instead of counting submissions, you can count the value of a field using the field parameter. This is useful for counting the quantity of an item sold, or the amount of money spent. Below is an example where we count the quantity of a Product whose Field ID is 2.

[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" field="2.3" goal="25"]

Parameters

• id integer required

  The form ID that acts as the data source for the progress meter.

• action string required

  The action that will be performed. Use “meter” to add a progress meter. 

• goal integer required

  Specify the goal amount for the progress meter. 

• field string optional

  Specify a field ID to count the sum of this field’s submitted values. Use “payment_amount” to count currency. 

• count_label string optional

  The label to display for the submission count. Must include %d to include the count. 

• goal_label string optional

  The label to display for the goal amount. Must include %d to include the count.

Summary

We’re releasing this plugin today with the plans to build additional features in the future. Currently, here’s what we have on our to-do list:

• Support for different colors and themes.
• Live updates as new entries are submitted.
• Option to calculate by true form total rather than captured payments.
• Offer this functionality as a custom block for the Block Editor.

Let us know if you have any ideas for other features or options you’d like to see in the plugin. We’re eager to hear how you’d like to use it!