Campaign Strategy Toolkit: Learn to plan a fundraising campaign

*Updated August 2023*
Whether your cause is personal or directed by an organization, this toolkit contains all the information you need on how to plan a donation-based fundraising campaign.

Even if you have dabbled with digital fundraising in the past, the information contained here can help enhance your knowledge and level up from standard campaigns.

This toolkit takes you through:

• • Defining your audience
  • Outlining a scope of work
  • Choosing a campaign layout
  • Effective story writing

At the end of this page, you’ll find downloadable worksheets to help you with your

Planning a fundraising campaign – Step 1: Pre-planning

Scope of Work

Outlining a scope of work for a digital fundraising campaign helps plan a roadmap for the team involved. Doing so ensures nothing is missed, predicts and plans for roadblocks, maintains your timeline, and measures success.

Items in your scope of work can include any or all of the following:

• • Campaign overview. A brief summary including objectives, target audience, monetary and nonmonetary goals, and expected outcomes.
  • Timeline. Specify expected deadlines for action items, the start and end dates of the campaign, story updates, and any milestone markers to track success (for example, when do you hope to reach the halfway point to your goal?). This does not have to be the full timeline (we’ll do that below!), just a general overview of when you might launch and finish this campaign.
  • Sharing channels. The avenues you’ll share your campaign on (social media, email, websites, etc.).
  • Key messages. The main points to resonate with your audience around what this campaign is for. For organizations, this should align with your mission.
  • Assets. Digital items you’ll require to complete the above, such as pictures, video, graphics, etc.
  • Fundraising tactics. Are you utilizing rewards, wishes, peer-to-peer or DIY fundraising, sponsor matching, etc?
  • Analytics. How will you track your traffic and success? Digital analytics like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel? Goal amount only? Amount of contributions? Effective fundraising fee?
  • Budget. Do you have a set amount to spend for this campaign, such as for marketing, assets, fees, etc?
  • Roles and responsibilities. Outline who is responsible for each action item and how the expected format of performance updates.
  • Risk management. What roadblocks do you expect to encounter, and how can you mitigate them?
  • Approvals and sign-offs. If applicable, what approvals are needed for certain campaign elements and major decisions?

Determine project costs

Your project costs can include a huge variety of things. Your goal may be unlimited – as in, the more you raise, the more you can help. For example:

• • Are you a nonprofit raising funds for a specific project? You may need to consider:
    • • Amount of beneficiaries
      • Campaign marketing activities and material
      • Asset creation (graphics, logos, videos)
      • Project budget (what you need to spend to fulfill promises, including equipment, subcontracting, etc.)
      • Contingency fund for the unexpected.
      • Rewards to supporters

• • Are you someone raising funds in CoCoPay for medical treatment? You may need to consider:
    • • Cost of treatment
      • Transportation costs
      • Loss of income
      • Child care

And two things you must consider for the crowdfunding campaign itself are fees and campaign type.

• • Fees. The fees you pay depend on the pricing model you choose. We have three different options, and with all of them, you will need to consider fees removed from your transactions:
    • • Simply Free: you will pay payment processing fees only.
      • Nearly Free (fee recovery): you will incur a 5% platform fee plus the payment processing fee. BUT, we will ask your supporters if they wish to cover fees for you, so you can expect a percentage of your fees to be covered. If your effective fee rate is lower than it would be in the Simply Free model, you are doing well! See this article for more information on effective fee rates.
      • Not Free: a 5% platform fee plus the payment processing fee will be deducted from each transaction and nothing more.

• • Campaign Type. If you are considering an All-or-nothing campaign type, you will want to add a 10% buffer to your goal to account for any failed pledges. See this article for more information.

See the table in our workbook below to plan out your goal.

Define your audience

Before putting too much effort into a campaign, you may want to consider whether your current audience can help fulfill your need. There is a simple way to estimate this, but keep in mind that it is an extremely generalized estimation designed to help plan your promotional strategies. On our platform, FundRazr, the average donation is $100 USD, and the average conversion rate (how many visitors to a campaign vs how many donate) is around 5%. Therefore, the size of your audience (x) needs to be:

x = Goal ÷ ave gift per donor ÷ conversion rate
x = goal ÷ 100 ÷ 0.05
For example, a $50,000 goal would need to reach approximately 10,000 people.

Note: if you happen to know your average donation amount and conversion rate, then replace the numbers in that equation. But if you do not have these metrics, our averages will suffice.

There are ways to lower this number! Don’t let this scare you. There are ways to grow your audience and increase your conversion rate.

Use the table in our downloadable workbook below to define your current audience.

Planning a fundraising campaign – Step 2: Campaign content & timeline

Choose a layout

The ConnectionPoint platforms FundRazr, CoCoPay, and PetFundr all have the same layouts as outlined below. The layout you choose should depend on your project and non-monetary goals (for example, is increasing awareness or your supporter base more important than collecting the funds?). If you have many rewards or wishes but also a desire to increase awareness and the number of supporters, you may want to consider a Social Storefront over a Simple Storefront.

Are you running an event with outside fundraisers where competition is a factor? Try the ‘Peer-to-peer’ layout. No competition factor? Perhaps DIY or Microprojects with Grid is your best choice.

Look over these layouts and their characteristics to determine what’s right for you/your team, and your project.

Layout	Gallery	Stats*	Sub-campaigns	Registration button	Leaderboard	Reward location
Standard	Mandatory	Optional	Optional	Optional	Optional (in multi-tier mode)	Right side
Social Storefront	Mandatory	No	No	No	No	Main page in a grid
Simple Storefront	No	No	No	No	No	Main page in a grid
Rewards Flow	No	No	No	No	Optional (in multi-tier mode)	Right side
Donation Form (Organizations only)	No	No	No	No	No	Main page in lines
Peer-to-peer (Organizations only)	Mandatory	Optional	Yes	Mandatory	Mandatory	Story tab
Do-it-yourself (Organizations only)	Mandatory	Optional	Yes	Mandatory	No	Story tab
Microproject with leaderboard (Organizations only)	Mandatory	Optional	Yes	Optional	Mandatory	Story tab
Microproject with grid (Organizations only)	Mandatory	Optional	Yes	Optional	No	Story tab

Outline your story.

Your story is the most important part of your campaign because it helps your audience emotionally connect with you and your project.

The basics of your campaign should include:

• • An engaging opening line or two.
  • A clear outline of the problem.
  • A detailed explanation of the solution (i.e. what the funds are going to).
  • Clear calls to action (Contribute AND share!).

The details of your story will depend on your focus:

• • Are you fundraising for a personal non-medical project on FundRazr or PetFundr? We recommend this article.
  • Are you crowdfunding for medical reasons (treatment or device)? Try this article.

There are worksheets in the workbook at the end of this page to help outline your story.

Update planning

Your story doesn’t end with this campaign’s launch. As the campaign runs, your current and potential audience will be looking for new information to read and share, and you provide this to them in the form of updates.

Updates also provide additional content for you and your current supporters to share and grow your audience. The type of content you provide depends on your campaign, but there is one thing that an update is not: an additional ask for more donations. Updates should be a continuation of the initial story, ideally showing the impact of what funds were already donated. Always provide new and valuable content!

Not all updates can be planned; however, it’s a good idea to plan ahead and produce content that you can use for your updates sporadically throughout your campaign to keep the momentum going.

Here are some ideas:

Plan what updates you can in our workbook at the end of this page.

Campaign timeline

As shown above, there are quite a few moving pieces in planning a digital fundraising campaign. Especially for large asks, the work needs to be done in order to maximize your chances of success. To prevent falling behind in planning, and therefore your campaign and the project as a whole, create a timeline of action items to be completed, including the deadline and who is responsible for completing them.

Note: for large projects, we recommend a project management application. Asana has a free version if your team is 15 people or less.

There’s an example of a simple timeline in our workbook below.

Planning a digital fundraising campaign – Step 3: Campaign creation

Campaign checklist

To ensure you don’t miss anything, we’ve created a checklist for your campaign, plus links to our Help Centre articles to guide you through each process on the platforms:

• • Create your campaign. Don’t focus on perfection at this stage; you can edit everything before you launch.
  • Write down your launch date here and work towards that date: _____________________________
  • Select the right layout for your campaign.
  • Craft your campaign’s story.
  • Choose a cover image and upload any other pictures to the media gallery and story.
  • Insert any Reward items (if applicable)
  • Upload your campaign video.
  • Set up registration and sub-campaigns (if applicable)
  • Ensure your payment processor (PayPal and/or Stripe) is connected to your account.
  • Customize your email receipt that will be sent to your supporters when their contribution is completed.
  • On launch day, double-check everything on your campaign, and hit “Launch.” 

Campaign Strategy Workbook

*Please consider the environment before printing. Try copying and pasting or recreating tables on your own.*

Taking the time to properly plan a fundraising campaign can save you stress and work in the future. But this is just the beginning! Don’t forget to check out our other toolkits as well as the Fundraiser Hub blog for more ways to maximize your campaign success.

Helpful additions to this toolkit include:

• • How to write a fundraising campaign story
  • The fear of asking for money and tips to overcome it

Looking for your next steps? We recommend these toolkits:

• • Campaign promotion toolkit
  • The 6 campaign success indicators