Hello! In this lesson, we’ll get a 10,000-foot view of Funraise’s Campaign Site editor and Peer-to-Peer Page management tools.
Campaign Sites are stand-alone fundraising micro-sites that can be completely customized to match your brand and campaign strategy. They can be configured as a single-page donation campaign or a complete peer-to-peer campaign website that can host thousands of individual fundraising pages.
As you’ll soon see, Campaign Sites are one of the most powerful fundraising features available on Funraise’s platform.
Campaign Sites can be accessed from your side menu. Sites is where you’ll build and design your fundraising websites. Pages is where you’ll manage your fundraiser’s pages.
First, let’s take a quick peek at Sites. Here you can create a new Campaign Site or edit any of your existing sites or visit our live site. If you’ve archived sites, you can view your archived sites through the action menu in the list header.
In Pages, we can segment and manage individual pages on our campaign site. Here we’ll see any page that has a goal, which includes your site’s homepage, individual fundraiser pages, and team fundraising pages.
You can click into a fundraiser’s page to view their details or click directly to access the fundraiser’s live page.
How to create a list of individual fundraising pages that have reached their goal.
Add filters
Once we apply these filters, we’ll be viewing just individual fundraisers that have reached their goal.
Using page filters, we can create all sorts of custom segments. We can also save this list so it’s available for your entire team. Just enter a list name and then select Save List in the table actions menu. Your saved list will appear in the Lists tab.
You can also export a custom list of pages by selecting export CSV from the table actions menu.
Alright, now we have a good understanding of both the Sites and Pages sections, let’s jump back to our Sites section to create a new site to learn more about Funraise’s site editor.
To create a new site, click New Campaign Site.
We’ll enter a campaign name, which appears publicly, so we’ll want something clear like Animal Adoption Campaign.
Next, enter a goal amount; let’s go for $10,000.
We can also set a campaign end date, which may be helpful for internal tracking. If you’re using Funraise’s Facebook fundraiser integration, this date will also be passed to Facebook as the fundraiser's end date.
Next, we’ll customize our campaign site URL. This is your free SSL-secured campaign site web address. It’s best to keep this short and related to your campaign, like animal-adoption.
It’s important to note that your campaign site URL cannot be changed once your site is created, so double-check your URL customization before creating your site.
If you prefer a completely custom site domain, you can add a custom domain by contacting Funraise’s technical support team after you’ve created your site.
You can also start your campaign using a previous site as a template. When you start with a previous site template, you’ll be able to use content and design theme settings from the selected campaign site. It’s good to know that you can also select an archived site as a template.
Now's the time to enable peer-to-peer features—if that's your jam. You can also activate these features at any time after creating your site. (We’ll cover peer-to-peer fundraising features in another lesson, so for now, we’ll leave peer-to-peer toggled off.)
After creating your fundraising site, you’ll land on the site editor, which is a fullscreen live preview editor. Your site is populated with example content and has a prebuilt design theme, but you can edit all of these details.
For example, click into edit the header text to change the theme variation for a section… or add an entirely new section. In future lessons, we’ll dive deeper into each of these actions.
For now, let’s get acquainted with the editor features. In the top bar, we can access the page template we want to edit.
For this campaign, we only have one page, our home page. If we had peer-to-peer features activated, we’d have access to edit a few more page types, for example, the fundraiser page template.
It’s good to know that we can also create custom pages to host on our campaign site, which may be useful for Frequently Asked Questions, or other supporting content.
In the actions menu of the page selector, we can access templates that can be applied to the page. Templates are prebuilt content sections that are a great way to start your campaign site build.
It’s important to know that templates will replace ALL the content on your page, so you’ll only want to apply a template at the beginning of your page build. A template only applies content; your site’s design theme is not impacted by a template.
Alrighty, to the left of the top bar we can access our site’s design themes, our site’s Giving Form, our site’s overall settings, and a quick link to view our public live site. Of course, our site is not yet live because we have not published it.
In themes, we can control the fonts, colors, and design details for our site. We’ll cover themes in detail in another lesson.
Each site has its own default Giving Form. Here you can edit the design and settings for your site’s donation form and automated donation receipts. Buttons on your campaign site will launch this form.
In your universal site settings, you can access general settings, peer-to-peer settings, and advanced settings. Advanced settings is where developers can add custom code to the head of your campaign site, for example, custom CSS, or analytics tracking scripts.
And finally, in our top bar, we can save and publish any changes we’ve made.
Clicking Save will save any changes in our editor, but will not publish changes to our public live site. To publish our saved changes, we’ll need to click publish—which is only available when there are unpublished saved changes.
A note on publishing changes… it can take a few minutes for your changes to appear globally. If you don’t see your changes on your live site after a few minutes, you’re likely viewing a local browser cache of content—try hard refreshing or clearing your browser’s cache to see the most updated changes.
Moving down from the editor top bar… we can access our site’s top navigation where we can edit the navigation display and theme settings as well as the logo, site title, sharing, and button options.
Down the page, we can edit the sections that make up the page's body. Page sections are incredibly powerful, so we’ll cover them in depth in another lesson, but for now, let’s have some fun.
Let’s say we want to create a new section with three columns. We’ll click to add a section. Here, in our section library, we have many options to add prebuilt sections for text, images, and videos, but we’ll just need a simple text section for this example.
Great, we’ve got a single-column text section. Clicking into the settings for this section, we can add more columns and items. And now we’ve got our three-column grid. But it’s boring! No problem, we can add donation buttons that will launch our site’s forms. And let’s add a background image… and pop these grid items onto raised surfaces. Okay… we could keep going and have more design fun, but this is a good introduction.
In our next lessons, we’ll dive deeper into many of these tools. See you soon!
