Tiered Campaigns are one of the fastest-growing tools in fundraising, and we're excited to support your institution's complex campaign needs. Learn more about the basics of Tiered Campaigns.
Instead of taking a ‘catch all’ approach to your big campaigns, this structure can help you better tailor content and giving experiences with different donor interests or their relationship with your institution.
Anatomy of Tiered Campaigns
Designations, Designation Groups, and Affiliations
Tiered campaigns can be built around designations or affiliations. Before you start really building out your Tiered Campaign, it's important to add the affiliations and designations onto the campaign page! Those designations, designation groups, or affiliations can then be tied to a specific landing page.
- Adding Designations, ex: The Annual Fund
- Designation Groups, ex: Group = Athletics, Designations = Soccer, Softball, Golf, etc.
- Adding Affiliations or Custom Affiliations, ex: Parents, Students, Grandparents, etc.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 Landing pages
These are the sub-pages representing different segments within your institution. With a Tiered Campaign, all related pages can be created and managed within a single campaign. An example of a Landing Page might be for the athletics department, a particular team, DEI initiatives, an academic department, parents, young alumni, or the Class of 2008. Landing pages can be tied to a single designation, a group of designation, an affiliation, or select affiliation values -- you'll set this up by defining the ‘Relevant Gifts’ for that landing page.
"Relevant Gifts"
As a school admin, you determine which gifts count towards each respective Landing Page. Within the ‘Relevant Gifts’ section of your landing page, you will define which gifts are relevant to be counted on each landing page. Regardless of whether the donor gives on the Tier 1 campaign page or a Tier 2 or Tier 3 landing page, if their donation is made to one of these relevant designations or the relevant affiliation it will be counted on the relevant landing page and any other landing pages that include this relevant gift.
Multiple Designations, One Transaction ("Add Additional Gift")
Donors can split their gift to multiple finds in a single transaction. If their gift includes multiple designations or designations that fall into multiple different groups, the appropriate portions of their donation will display on the relevant landing page and the full amount of their gift will display on the Tier 1 campaign.
Multiple Affiliations, One Transaction
Donors can select multiple affiliations. If the donor identifies as both a parent and an alum, their donation will display on all of the Affiliation based landing pages where their gift is relevant.
Conditional Email Templates
Conditional email templates allow you to configure specific thank you emails to donors based on designation they gave to or which affiliation they identified with. Learn more here.
More Match & Challenge Restriction options
Your advocates’ matches and challenges can be highly personalized. Your advocates can:
- Restrict matches/challenges by a whole designation group, or a single designation.
- Restrict affiliation-based matches/challenges by a specific affiliation, a specific class year/dropdown, or a combination of the two (Just for Class of 2016 Alumni or just Class of 2023 Parents)!
- Restrict matches/challenges by a single designation/group designation AND an affiliation. For example, just for Alumni who make a gift to Football.
Building a Tiered Campaign
In order to build your Tiered Campaign in the most efficient way, there’s an order of operations that should be followed!
Step 1: Set up the main Campaign page, Designations, and Affiliations
1. Draft your Campaign: Visit your ‘Campaigns’ tab and clicking ‘Create a Campaign’! Remember: You do not need to build an individual campaign for each Tier 2.
2. If relevant, Add Designations:
Note: If you will only have Tiered landing pages based on Affiliations and are not collecting designations as part of your campaign, you can skip this step!
Once you’ve drafted your campaign, head to the campaign Settings > Campaign Forms and double-check that you have all the designations pulled in for the entire campaign, especially the ones you want to see represented on Tiered Landing Pages.
With Tiered Campaigns 2.0, we’re enabling donors to give to any designation or select any affiliation from any landing page by configuring one master form on the Tier 1 campaign. Different designations or affiliations will be auto-selected on the giving form based on what you’ve indicated as ‘relevant’ when building your Tier 2 or Tier 3 Landing Page.
You can configure your Giving Form to have individual designation options or Designation Groups. Building a Designation Group allows for a Tiered Landing Page to count all designations under that group as ‘relevant.’ For example, you might create an Athletics Group (screenshot #1 below) and pull in all varsity sport designations at your institution. In the next step, you’ll mark the Athletics Group as the relevant gifts for your Athletics Tier 2 Landing Page. Alternatively, if you want a landing page for each sport, you’d include each sport as a single designation (not nested under a group) and mark that single designation as relevant for a given landing page.
3. Add Affiliations: Once you’ve drafted your Tier 1 campaign, head to the campaign Settings > Campaign Forms and confirm that you have checked off all the affiliations you want to see represented on Tier 2 Landing Pages. These Tier 2 landing pages can be built on an entire affiliation (ex: Alumni), an affiliation value (ex: Class Year), or a selected list of affiliation values (ex: just Reunion Class Years, or Young Alumni years).
Step 2: Create Tiered Landing Pages
Now that your designations and/or affiliations have been added in the Tier 1 Campaign Giving Form settings, you’re ready to start building your Tier 2 and Tier 3 Landing Pages. Head to your campaign Settings > Tiered Landing Pages on the left-hand menu. Click New Landing Page to get started. The required materials needed to make a Tiered Landing Page live are indicated with a red asterisk, you’ll need:
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Landing Page name (Ex: Athletics, DEI Initiatives, Young Alumni, Parents)
- This is the public-facing name of the landing page
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Goal Type - donor or dollar
- The goal number
- You can choose to hide the goal if you wish.
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Relevant Gifts - This is where you define which donations should be counted towards the donor/dollar totals on each landing page. You could define a single designation, a Group of designations, an affiliation (ex: Alumni), or specific selection of affiliation values as ‘relevant’ for that landing page (ex: Class of 2008, or All Reunion Class Years).
- Custom Campaign Card: This will be used as the visual for the landing page tile on the Tier 1 campaign.
There are many other optional pieces available to configure with your Tiered Landing Pages! Play around and get your landing pages set up to meet your needs and engage donors who care about those targeted initiatives!
Once you’ve got your Tiered Landing page in top-notch shape, hit Publish!
A few notes about publishing tiered campaign pages:
- If a user publishes a Tier 2 page with Tier 3 pages underneath, it will notify the user in the confirmation modal that ALL Tier 3 pages underneath will be published as well.
- A user can unpublish a Tier 3 page to Draft while the Tier 2 page remains published.
- If a user unpublishes a Tier 2 page with Tier 3 pages underneath, it will notify the admin in the confirmation modal that ALL Tier 3 pages underneath it will be unpublished as well.
About Tier 3 Landing Pages
With Tier 3 pages, you can have a designation (or affiliation) roll up to a Tier 2 group of designations (or affiliation), all of which rolls up to your Tier 1 campaign page.
A Tier 3 page displays on a Tier 2 page just like a Tier 2 page shows on the Tier 1 campaign page.
A few limitations to be aware of:
- A page cannot be swapped between T2 and T3 and vice versa. Once the page type is set, you'd need to create a new page to change its Tier level.
- Once a T3 page is associated with a T2, it can't be moved to another. So we recommend figuring out your hierarchy first.
- We can't display T3 page tiles directly on the T2 AND T1 page. It will only display on the T2 page that it's tied to. If you really want Baseball to be on both, you can create a T2 version and a T3 version that rolls up to the Athletics T2. If you set both pages to have "Relevant designation = Baseball Fund" it should mirror the count but will have different URLs.
Previewing Tiered Landing Pages
School admins can preview Tiered landing pages by clicking the name on the Tiered Landing Pages view. If you'd like to share a Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3 page while a Pre-Launch page is active, simply add ?campaign_view=true to the URL of the page (note: the campaign must be launched for this URL addendum to allow the tiered landing pages to be viewed). This gives you the flexibility to send Tiered page links to campus partners for review without delaying the ability to collect early gifts during a pre-launch stage!
Step 3: Configure Display
- Tile Order: Head to the Tiered Landing Page settings and drag and drop to reorder each Tier 2 or Tier 3 tile.
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Tile Display Count & Pagination: How many Tiered Landing pages do you want to display by default? Head to the 'Images' and display' tab to set the Tiered Landing Page display. You can chose between 4 and 36 Tiered Landing page tiles to display be default.
- Landing Page tiles that don't display on the initial page can be accessed by clicking through additional pages of Tiered Landing Pages, or by searching!
- Tiered Landing Page Order On Campaign: Head to the 'Images and Display' tab and determine where on the campaign page
Step 4: Optimizing Reporting for Data Ingestion
With the addition of some of these new features there are some reporting optimization suggestions we strongly encourage you to add to your data entry plan for Tiered Campaigns!
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Tiered Landing Page Reporting. In order to distinguish which gifts counted towards a specific Tiered Landing Page add the following fields to your default donation report or any custom reports you build for the campaign or daily data entry.
- tiered_campaign_landing_page_id
- tiered_campaign_landing_page_name
You can add these columns by heading to your Online Giving dashboard under Reporting > Settings.
Split Designation Gift Reporting. With additional designation options, it's worth exploring how to optimize your reports for multi-designation transactions.
Limitations
- Each Tiered Landing Page requires some initial setup, including a designation, group of designations, or affiliations to calculate relevant gifts.
- Smaller shops may not have the marketing resources to generate unique content for each page or segment donor appeals. Note that T2 and T3 pages will default to the T1 images, video and display settings when not customized
- All pages use the same giving form fields (though designations/affiliations tied to a T2 or T3 page are selected by default) and must run on the same campaign timeline.
- Donors who navigate through multiple T2 or T3 pages may lose advocacy and unique link tracking tags