Campaigns

What a campaign is for

Some gifts arrive on their own. Others arrive because you asked, a giving day, a spring appeal, the annual fund letter, the capital campaign that has been three years in the planning. A campaign is how Fay keeps that second kind together, so you can say what one ask actually brought in rather than watching it dissolve into the season total.

A campaign needs a name and nothing else. A goal, dates and a description are all optional, and a campaign with no goal simply does not draw a goal bar.

Use the name your spreadsheets already use. It is the name a donation import looks for, and a campaign named one way here and another way in a file will end up as two.

Campaigns and seasons

A campaign can name a season, or leave it blank. Both are correct, and which one you want depends on the campaign.

• An annual appeal names its season. It runs once, inside one performing year, and reads naturally next to that year's totals.
• A capital campaign leaves it blank. It runs for years. Filing the whole thing under the season it started in would report gifts against the wrong year for the rest of its life.

Nothing is lost either way. Every individual gift still belongs to exactly one season, which is how all of Fay's reporting works, and campaigns do not change it. A multi-season campaign's total simply adds up gifts that live in several different seasons, which is precisely what a capital campaign total is.

The goal bar

Set a goal and the campaign page draws a bar, a percentage, and how much is still to come. Leave it unset and Fay says “No goal set” rather than drawing an empty bar at 0%, which would read as failure instead of as a campaign nobody has put a target on.

The percentage is not capped. Pass your goal and the bar fills and the number goes past a hundred. That is the news, and rounding it down to “100%” would hide it.

Archived gifts stop counting the moment you archive them. There is no stored total to go stale.

Attaching gifts

Two ways, and they produce the same thing.

• On the gift. The Record donation form has a Campaign box. Leave it as “Not part of a campaign” for the gifts that simply arrived.
• In an import. Map a column to Campaign in a donation import and every row that names a campaign is attached to it. A campaign Fay has not seen before is created for you, once, however many rows name it.

A gift can belong to one campaign, or to none. If you find yourself wanting two, that is usually two gifts.

Getting the donors out

Export donors on a campaign page is a link into the Donations list, already filtered to that campaign, which then exports exactly what it is showing. It is built that way on purpose: a separate export written separately is a second answer that can disagree with the first.

The same list is where you would narrow further before exporting, to a date range, to unthanked gifts only, to one season of a multi-season campaign.

Maria’s giving day

Riverbend takes part in a statewide giving day every April. Last year it brought in a hundred and twenty gifts in thirty-six hours, and the platform sent Maria a spreadsheet afterwards.

She makes a campaign called 401Gives 2026, names the season, and sets a goal of fifteen thousand. Then she imports the spreadsheet with the Campaign column mapped to it. A hundred and twenty gifts land, all attached, and the bar reads 92%, with nine hundred and change still to go, which is the number she puts in the email she sends that afternoon.

The capital campaign she is gearing up for gets no season at all. It will run for three years, and in the third year she still wants one number for the whole thing.