A campaign groups giving toward one effort, such as an annual appeal, capital drive, or emergency fund. Every gift and pledge that counts toward that effort can then be tracked and reported together. An appeal is one solicitation within the campaign, such as an email blast, gala, or phone drive. This article explains how campaigns and appeals relate, what campaign dates do, and when to use the product override setting.
A Campaign Holds the Effort; Appeals Are the Ways You Ask
A campaign includes a name, opening and closing date, dollar goal, Portal image, notes, and active-or-inactive flag. Gifts, pledges, and giving processes can name a campaign directly, and the campaign page totals credited gifts and pledges against the campaign goal.
Appeals sit one level below a campaign. Each appeal has its own name, goal, and notes, but it does not have its own active flag. You can make a campaign active or inactive, but you cannot do that for individual appeals. An appeal’s identifier is always built from its campaign’s identifier. For example, creating an appeal named “Email” under a campaign identified as END_OF_YEAR produces an identifier such as END_OF_YEAR:EMAIL. That lets you tell which campaign an appeal belongs to from the appeal identifier. Gifts and pledges can credit an appeal as well as its campaign, so you can compare the gala with the email blast within the same year-end effort.
Campaign Dates Do Not Stop or Start Anything
A campaign’s start and end dates are saved and shown on the campaign, and you can search for campaigns by date range. The dates are informational only. Rhythm does not use them to decide when a campaign is available. Pickers still offer a campaign before its start date and after its end date, and a gift or pledge can name it at any time. Rhythm also does not check that the closing date falls after the opening date, so a campaign can be saved with the dates in the wrong order.
If you need a campaign to stop appearing in pickers for staff and donors, use its active flag instead of its end date. An inactive campaign changes what is offered; a campaign whose end date has passed does not.
What the Override Fundraising Products Setting Is For
Gifts for a fund are normally recorded through that fund’s own fundraising product. The Override Fundraising Products switch appears on the campaign form and on each appeal. It lets you choose a different product for a fund for gifts made under that campaign or appeal, such as when those gifts need different confirmation wording or accounting code. When you turn on the switch, Rhythm shows one row for each active fund, and each row offers only that fund’s own products. A row left on “Use the default product for this fund” is dropped when you save. If no rows are left, the switch turns itself back off.
Warning
Rhythm stores the fund-and-product pairs you choose here, but it has not been confirmed whether a different product changes what happens when a gift is recorded under that campaign or appeal. Until that is settled, treat this setting as a record of your intended product mapping, not as a guaranteed change to how those gifts are processed.
One confirmed effect of the override is that a fund or product named in a campaign or appeal override is protected from deletion while the override still names it. If you try to delete a fund or fundraising product and Rhythm refuses, first check whether a campaign or appeal override is still using it.
Related
See the related articles for the day-to-day work of creating and changing campaigns, adding and managing appeals, setting up product overrides, and reviewing a campaign’s progress toward its goal.