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Campaigns and offerings

A campaign is a fundraising appeal — a cause you are raising money for. An offering is one specific way to give within it. A campaign has many offerings; each offering belongs to one campaign.

Take a clean-water appeal. The campaign is the appeal itself. Building a well, a month of emergency water, a household water filter — each of those is an offering: a distinct thing a donor can choose to fund. You describe the appeal once, add the ways to give beneath it, and N3O generates a page for each.

Every campaign and every offering has its own page, published at its own web address and able to appear in search engines such as Google. The two are different pages, each written for a different moment in a donor's decision.

The campaign page

This is the page a donor lands on when they want to support the cause. It lives at /donate/<campaign> — for example /donate/clean-water.

What the page contains is up to you. We recommend leading with a hero image, a donation form for giving to the campaign as a whole, and a grid of the campaign's offerings, so a donor can pick a more specific way to help. Around those you can add whatever the cause needs: the story behind the appeal, photographs, a "what happens next". The layout below is a common starting point, not a fixed template.

MockupA common layout — a hero image, a campaign-level donation form and the grid of offerings — with the charity’s own content below (here, a “what happens next”). You choose what to include.

Because it has its own address, you can send donors to the campaign page directly, from an email, a social post or an advert, and it is the page a search engine such as Google shows when someone searches for the appeal:

MockupHow it appears in search results. Campaign and offering pages are in your site’s sitemap, so they can be found and indexed. (Crowdfunding pages are not — more on that under Crowdfunding.)

The offering page

This is the page for one specific way of giving. It sits beneath the campaign, at /donate/<campaign>/<offering> — for example /donate/clean-water/build-a-well. It says little about the campaign around it; instead it covers that one offering and carries its own donation form, with its own suggested amounts. It is the page to link when you are promoting a single, concrete thing to fund. As with the campaign page, you decide what it contains; the donation form is the one piece we would always keep.

MockupThe offering page: one way to give, its own detail, and its own donation form with its own suggested amounts.

The four kinds of campaign

Every campaign is one of four kinds. The kind sets how the appeal behaves; the pages and offerings work the same way across all of them.

KindWhat it's for
StandardAn ordinary appeal that runs until you close it — the most common kind.
TelethonA time-boxed appeal, such as a fundraising night. Its page is live only between the start and end you set.
GivingStraightforward general or regular giving. A giving campaign cannot be used for crowdfunding.
QurbaniA seasonal appeal tied to Qurbani, with its own season dates.

An offering has no kind of its own; it is simply a way to give. What a donor chooses on it — a one-off gift, a sponsorship, a regular donation — is a property of the donation form, not a type you set on the offering.

Why this matters

Because each campaign and offering is a page in its own right, you can point a donor at exactly the right place rather than a general donate screen, and the closer the page is to what prompted the gift, the more of those visitors go on to give. Every page is generated from what you enter once, so the wording a donor reads and the figures you report on come from the same source, with nothing to keep in step by hand.

Editing your campaigns and offerings

You write and change all of this in your website's editor. What you edit there is not the live page itself: when you publish, N3O rebuilds the public page from what you entered and serves it at its address. That is why an edit appears only once you publish, and why a page's web address is not the same as where you edit it.

The step-by-step lives in the Websites section, alongside everything else you edit on your site: Editing campaigns and Editing offerings. For the donation form on these pages — suggested amounts, gift type and the rest — see Donation form.