The Community Funded system uses specific terminology to refer to different elements of our fundraising tools. Below you will find a short list of terms and how they are used.
Your platform is what you purchased from Community Funded: you have an account where you can see all of the campaigns, programs, and sites (portals) that belong to your Community Funded ecosystem. You can manage global settings, administrators, and many other elements using platform settings.
Portals refer to unique sites implemented for you by Community Funded. Each portal needs to be attached to a URL – either one we own (hosted), one we own but masked by one you own (hosted and masked), or one you own (embedded). Reporting, custom messaging, and other settings are governed at the portal level. URLs can be reused over time by different portals, but only one portal can use a URL at a time.
Programs are twofold, and detailed below:
A standard program is a grouping of campaigns under an “umbrella”, with a video and description at the top of the page and campaigns grouped below (sort of like a nested explore page.) Multiple standard programs can coexist on an explore page under the regular crowdfunding portal layout. Please contact the Service Desk if you would like to implement a mixed-view explore page, a multi-standard-program explore page, or with other questions.
A giving event program is our more robust program template, and it includes countdown pages and timers, gamification, customization settings, and more. Please see this video for more about giving event settings.
Explore pages simply refer to the landing page for each portal, essentially the “home” page. There are several different types of layout available.
Rewards are items (sometimes called kickbacks, giftbacks, or other terms that indicate that rewards are pre-purchase items or thank you gifts) that can be offered by campaign owners and claimed by donors. Rewards are completely optional, and can be enabled or disabled at the app code level.
Application codes are unique identifiers with groupings of settings, and they tie campaigns to portals. You can have as many application codes as you wish.
Custom fields refer to fields at the campaign application level that help our reporting spit out what your gift processing department needs to follow gifts from our system into yours. Fund designation, fund ID, and appeal code are common fields that we provide, so that your team can add whatever values are needed in these fields. The field titles and their contents map to your reporting.
You can add more than one custom field value for each campaign, which creates a dropdown list for donors to choose from during their donation experience. This adds another data point to your understanding of donor affinities, and allows for clean, speedy donation processes that allow donors to earmark their dollars for exactly what they want.
Please check back… this list is expanding.