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Plan and Launch a Campaign

Goal: Set up a time-bound fundraising appeal with a goal, audience, and dedicated tracking so you can see in real time how it's performing and run a clean post-mortem when it's over.

What a campaign is​

A campaign is a fundraising appeal with a defined window, a goal, and (usually) a public page donors can give through. Campaigns aggregate donations from many channels — direct mail, email, social, embedded forms, peer-to-peer fundraisers — into one bucket so you can answer "how is the holiday match going?" with a single number.

Common campaign types:

  • Annual appeal — yearly direct-mail / email push
  • Match challenge — donor or board match doubling all gifts up to a cap
  • Capital campaign — multi-year construction or expansion fundraising
  • Crisis or rapid-response — disaster, emergency, urgent need
  • End-of-year giving — December push timed to tax-deductibility

Before you launch​

Decide:

  • Goal amount — the headline number you're trying to hit
  • Window — start and end dates
  • Designation — what fund / project the gifts support
  • Audience — who you'll appeal to (segments, tags, capacity ratings)
  • Channels — direct mail, email, embedded form, peer-to-peer, events
  • Owner — who's accountable for hitting the goal

Without these, the campaign exists but no one is running it.

Creating the campaign​

Under Fundraising → Campaigns, click New Campaign. Capture:

  • Name — public-facing, donor-readable
  • Slug — the URL-friendly version (e.g., holiday-match-2026); used in public links
  • Goal amount
  • Start and end dates
  • Designation — fund, project, fundraising event
  • Description — appears on the public page; explain why this campaign matters

Save. The campaign is created in Draft or Active state depending on dates.

Public campaign page​

When you give the campaign a slug and description, Ayuna generates a public page at /fundraise/campaign/:slug (or similar — see Give Your Campaign a Public Page for the full setup including images and social-share metadata).

Tracking gifts to the campaign​

Every donation flow has a campaign field. When a gift is recorded:

  • Online — the campaign auto-fills if the donor came from the campaign's public page
  • Manual — staff selects the campaign explicitly
  • Pledge — the pledge designation includes the campaign
  • Sponsorship — the sponsorship can be tied to the campaign

The campaign detail page shows all of these in one place.

Real-time progress​

The campaign detail surfaces:

  • Total raised
  • Number of gifts
  • Average gift size
  • Top donors
  • Daily progress chart
  • Recent gifts feed

This is the page to share with the campaign team during the run — it answers the "how are we doing?" question without needing a custom report.

Communicating during the campaign​

Use Communications to:

  • Send the launch email with the campaign link
  • Send mid-campaign progress updates ("we're 60% to goal!")
  • Send a final-push reminder a few days before close
  • Send a thank-you email to all donors after close

All four can be templated and reused for future campaigns.

After the campaign closes​

  • Run the campaign performance report — see Analyze Campaign Performance
  • Send thank-yous within 48 hours — speed matters here
  • Capture lessons learned in the campaign notes for next time
  • Don't immediately delete or archive — the campaign should remain queryable for retrospectives and for donors asking "what happened to my gift?"