Soft Launching Your Campaign

While it is important to launch your public campaign with a bang, the most successful GiveCampus campaigns typically begin with a ‘soft launch.’ Before sharing your campaign widely with your community, we recommend a ‘quiet phase’ designed to give select volunteers early access so that they can begin generating early activity and demonstrate momentum. Typically, we recommend soft launching two weeks to two days ahead of your campaign, depending on how much proactive volunteer training you plan on doing!

WHY 'SOFT LAUNCH' A CAMPAIGN: 

Create GiveCampus Volunteer Experts: Launching the campaign early gives you the time to turn your advocates into experts on the GiveCampus platform. Providing them with early access allows them the opportunity to:

• Sign up for their GiveCampus account
• Become comfortable with the GiveCampus sharing tools
• Upload their personal videos
• Create a match/challenge gift!

Keys to Creating Volunteer Experts during your soft launch:

• Host a volunteer training!
  The Partner Success team will be happy to host a volunteer training for your early advocates to walk them through the ins and outs of the platform so that they have the tools and information they need to be a super-advocate. If you’d like to host it yourself, use these resources to get those folks ready to advocate!
• “Early Insider Access”
  We recommend positioning this as “early insider access for the schools most generous supporters” as a way to help your volunteers feel extra special. 

Generate Early Campaign Activity: Donors want to be part of campaigns that they believe will be successful. Early campaign activity is a key indicator of long term campaign success. What types of early activity should you aim for?

• Donors/Dollars: We recommend aiming to hit 10% of your overall campaign goal during this early phase. When donors arrive on your campaign page the day of the public launch and see that the needle is already moving towards your goal, they are more likely to get involved themselves.
• Matches/Challenges: Not only are having matches/challenges pre-populated on the campaign page likely to motivate new donors when your campaign goes public, but it also encourages your donors to take advantage of these features themselves through role modeling their use. 
• Personal Videos: By populating your ‘advocates’ tab with pleas during your soft-launch, there will be more great and personalized content for donors to be inspired by when the campaign goes public. Personal Videos are a unique GiveCampus feature, so if first-time donors don’t see that others have made Personal Videos, it is less likely that they will take the step and opt to create a plea of their own. Encourage your advocates and early adopters to lead by example by setting up matches/challenges and creating Personal Videos.

HOW DO I 'SOFT LAUNCH' MY CAMPAIGN?

To ensure that your soft launch is only visible to the specific individuals who you’ve identified as your early advocates, you can hide your campaign through your administrator dashboard. To hide your page:

Step 1: Navigate to the ‘Campaigns’ tab of your ‘Administrator Dashboard.’

Step 2: Find the campaign that you are hoping to hide and in that campaign’s corresponding row, click on the word ‘No’ under the ‘Hide’ column to change it to ‘Yes.’ 

At this point, your campaign will be hidden.

Although your campaign will not appear on your GiveCampus homepage while it is hidden, you can still share it with your early volunteers by sharing the campaign link directly. When sharing the campaign, let your volunteers know that they are insiders are modeling the way for others by generating campaign activity. You can also share with these volunteers that while they should feel free to interact with the many platform features and make their gift, they should not share out the campaign broadly until the campaign publicly launches.

By doing a ‘soft launch’, you can ensure that when your campaign goes live to a wide audience, you have a head start and can continue with a strong trajectory towards the finish line.

WANT TO SOFT-LAUNCH, BUT NOT QUITE READY TO MAKE YOUR MAIN PAGE LIVE? CREATE A PRE-LAUNCH LANDING PAGE!

If you want to have a landing page available, but your main page is not totally ready for non-admins to view, you can create a pre-launch landing page instead.  

Using Pre-launch Landing Pages allows you to create a page “in front” of your campaign to let your community visit your campaign before the big day and engage with early access content. These pages can be launched before the campaign is ready to go so you can get the word out to your community as you're refining your actual campaign. The best part is that the URL for the page is the same as the campaign URL, so once the campaign is live, your community doesn’t need to be sent a new link. 

Learn how to build your pre-launch landing page by following the steps outlined here!