What is a campaign?

A campaign is a single fundraising effort in GiveForms. It's the unit of work everything else hangs off of — the donation form donors fill out, the emails they receive, the donations recorded against it, the conversion metrics in your dashboard. Most organizations run multiple campaigns at once, each serving a different purpose.

What's in a campaign

Every campaign has:

• One donation form — either a donation page or a donation popup, not both. The form is where donors land, choose an amount, and submit their gift.
• A set of transactional emails — thank-you, receipt, recurring notifications, payment failure notices, dedication emails. These are configured per-campaign so a year-end appeal can sound different from a Giving Tuesday push.
• The donations and donors that came through it — tracked separately for each campaign so you can see what's working.

When you create a new campaign, GiveForms asks you to choose between Donation Page (recommended) and Donation Popup. The choice is permanent for that campaign — to switch surfaces, create a new campaign. For guidance on which to pick, see Donation page setup.

What's not in a campaign

A campaign doesn't include the things that apply to your organization as a whole:

• Organization details — name, EIN, address, time zone
• Payment processor connections — Stripe and PayPal connect once at the org level and serve every campaign
• Team members and roles — access is granted to the organization, not individual campaigns
• The donor portal — one portal per org, shared across all campaigns

These live at the organization level. Changing them affects every campaign at once.

Why organizations run multiple campaigns

A single campaign is rarely enough. Most organizations create new campaigns for:

• Initiatives and appeals — year-end, spring fundraiser, anniversary, capital campaign
• High-impact holidays — Giving Tuesday and New Year's Eve are two of the biggest single days in nonprofit fundraising; many organizations build dedicated campaigns for each
• Programs within the organization — a general fund campaign alongside specific program campaigns
• Events — galas, walks, telethons, virtual events
• Channels — separate campaigns for what's promoted via email versus social versus paid ads, so you can attribute conversion to the right channel
• Message testing — running two campaigns side-by-side with different copy to see which converts better

Each campaign has its own donation form URL (for pages) or embed code (for popups), so you can route traffic and measure performance per effort.

Campaign names

Campaign names are for your team's sorting and reporting — donors never see them. There's no naming convention to follow; pick whatever helps you and your team identify campaigns at a glance. The donor sees whatever's in the form's header, not the campaign's internal name.

The default campaign

Every organization designates one campaign as the default. The default acts as a fallback: if a visitor lands on a URL for a campaign that's been archived, or if they hit a mistyped campaign slug, GiveForms redirects them to the default campaign instead of showing a 404. The same applies to old links from emails, social posts, or QR codes when the original campaign is no longer active.

To set or change the default, open the overflow menu (the ... button) for a campaign in the campaigns list and choose Set Default Campaign. A DEFAULT tag appears next to the campaign name to show which one is currently designated. Only one campaign can be the default at a time.

Most organizations point the default at their general-fund or always-on giving page — something that makes sense to land on regardless of where the visitor was trying to go. Updating the default is one of the things to think about when archiving a long-running campaign: if the campaign you're archiving is the current default, set a different one first so visitors don't get redirected somewhere stale.

Per-campaign reporting

Every metric in GiveForms can be filtered by campaign. The Activity Dashboard lets you compare conversion rates, average donation sizes, and total raised across campaigns side-by-side. The campaign list itself shows summary stats — total raised, donations, active recurring plans — so you can spot which campaigns are performing without drilling in.

How to think about campaigns

A campaign is the unit you optimize. Treat each one as a discrete effort with a clear purpose: a specific appeal, a specific audience, a specific message. Donors who came for a major-donor appeal want a different experience than donors who came from a social media post, and trying to handle both in one campaign means neither converts as well as it could. Multiple focused campaigns almost always outperform one campaign trying to do everything.