Campaign success playbook
Strategy, planning, and proven tactics for hitting your goal.
14 articles
- Planning your campaign: the 6-week timelineA week-by-week roadmap from first planning meeting to launch day — sponsors, captains, content, early giving, and the final countdown.
- Setting the right goal and bonus goalHow to pick a primary goal you'll actually hit, size a bonus goal that keeps momentum alive, and make the math work with matching multipliers.
- Recruiting captains who actually raiseThe difference between a name on a list and a captain who brings in 30 gifts — how to recruit, equip, goal-set, and coach your team leaders.
- Finding matching sponsors and structuring your matchHow to recruit match sponsors, choose between 2× and 3×, size the pools, and use activation thresholds and time-boxing to maximize urgency.
- The pre-launch checklistEverything to verify in the final week before going live — test donations, team links, match pools, timeline settings, outreach, and roles.
- Early giving: banking 30% before you go liveWhy the strongest campaigns open with a third of the goal already raised — and how to run a quiet pre-campaign using the Early Giving window.
- Launch-day playbook: hour by hourA minute-one-to-midnight script for the day you go live — the opening blast, captain activation, the dashboard rhythm, and the evening surge.
- Writing donation appeals that convertCopy principles for emails, texts, and captain messages — one reader, one story, one ask — plus ready-to-adapt example snippets.
- The mid-campaign slump: reading analytics and reactingEvery campaign sags in the middle. How to diagnose whether it's traffic, conversion, or captains — and the specific plays that restart momentum.
- Running a live event with the Live ScreenTurn a dinner, concert, or community gathering into a giving surge — staging the jumbotron, scripting the room, and pairing it with a timed match.
- The final-hours pushThe last 10% of the clock often raises a fifth of the money — how to script the deadline surge, deploy your reserve match, and close every open loop.
- After the campaign: thanking donors, retention, and recurring giversThe week after the deadline decides next year's campaign — the 48-hour thank-you window, captain and sponsor debriefs, and converting one-time donors to monthly givers.
- The Finale Share KitTurn your campaign's result into shareable celebration media — story and square banners, a 30-second highlight video with your own music, and a one-click celebration email to every team.
- Goal celebrations on your pageConfigure the full-screen "We did it!" moment — pick the trigger and animation style, set how long later visitors see the encore, or fire it yourself with Celebrate now.