Crowdfunding and Giving Days

Crowdfunding is a content-centric bundle of features that sit on top of AlumnIQ’s giving services to drive a more engaged donor experience, ideally operated for a fixed period of time.

Introduction

Our approach to crowdfunding builds on top of the AlumnIQ giving module’s services. The benefits?

• single gift processing channel with no additional integration
• direct tie-in with email module for identity passthrough and dynamic customization
• familiar configuration with additional flexibility
• recurring gifts (ideal for long-running projects)
• instant tax receipting

We leveraged literally everything you already know about creating and managing giving operations through AlumnIQ and added a flexible, dynamic, and cause-centric interface on top of it. Best of both worlds!

Terminology

So we’re speaking the same language as you proceed through these docs, here are some common terms that you’ll want to keep in mind.

• Campaign: top level collection of projects. Think of it as a way to group related initiatives under one umbrella.
• Project: a cause, group, purpose, or other entity orchestrating a fundraiser.
• Contributor: a person who maintains content for one or more projects, typically a very engaged member of the group we’re raising money for
• Incentive: a “reason to give” that may have specific gift thresholds (and limits) that may result in an entitlement for the donor
• Path: the gift capture flow/form that a donor proceeds through as a result of clicking from a project page. Same as you’ve always used for traditional online giving support.
• Challenge: an automated donation matching system that provides flexibility to let the matching donor to choose how they’ll match donations.

Neat features of Campaigns

• you can have multiple active concurrent campaigns
• start and end times for auto launch and closure
• friendly url for non-obscure marketing
• native adjustment feature for donor and dollar counts

Neat features of Projects

same features as campaigns PLUS:

• optional goal sharing of dollars and or donors
• copy overrides for path intro, confirmation, and confirmation email
• unique minimum gift amount enforcement
• unique ask array
• promotional tools via Open Graph, Facebook, and Twitter
• hero image for project landing page
• unique pages for a project overview, FAQ, donor wall (dynamically generated), and posts (blog-style updates about the project)
• Contributor support - enlist volunteers to keep the posts and select other areas of project content updated on your behalf without a password!

Neat features of Incentives

• start and end times for auto launch and closure
• enforced minimum gift amount threshold to create the entitlement
• enforced limits on use/applicability to prevent overcommits
• unique ask array
• appeal code override

Neat features of Challenges

See the challenge docs for details. They’re powerful and a huge time saver!

Quick Build Process

1. Create or identify a path you want to use for these gifts.
2. Create a campaign and choose a reasonably friendly short url for it.
3. Create at least one project under the campaign.
4. Map each project to an appropriate path.
5. (optional) Create an incentive (if applicable) to drive donor behavior.
6. Share the link around and wait for the money to roll in!

Email - tokens and links

Tokens for crowdfunding come in two flavors; campaign and project. Each of the following five tokens are available for both campaigns and projects.

• URL
• Donor Goal
• Donor Total
• Dollar Goal
• Dollar Total

As always, we advise building your tokens in the email module using the tools provided. This helps eliminate any typos that would result in the tokens not being converted to values.

Upcoming: We are experimenting with the idea of crowdfunding in the form of “live images”. In other words, every time the image is requested, it is delivered as a lightweight SVG image with the latest value. This is one work around to static text in an email and the restriction that your stats in an email could be hours stale if rendered hours before the send. We are still working on the implementation, but if you’d like to beta test this concept, let us know in a ticket.

Appeal Codes

Crowdfunding donors follow the same appeal code hierarchy as all other donors. The crowdfunding-specific levels (3–5 below) only apply when no higher-priority source supplies a code. From highest to lowest priority:

1. URL parameter — ?appealcode= or ?appealCode= on the giving page URL. Always wins.
2. Email message-contact — If the donor arrived via an AlumnIQ email link containing an mc parameter, the appeal code from that email record is used.
3. Incentive appeal code — The appeal code configured on the specific crowdfunding incentive the donor selected.
4. Project appeal code — The appeal code configured on the crowdfunding project.
5. Campaign appeal code — The appeal code configured on the crowdfunding campaign.
6. Path default — The catch-all appeal code on the giving path, the same as for any non-crowdfunding donor.

Note that crowdfunding donors do not arrive via a pitch link, so there is no pitch level — after the campaign appeal code, the fallback goes directly to the path default.

For the full hierarchy diagram including the non-crowdfunding paths, see Appeal Code Hierarchy.

Reporting and API