Campaign leaderboards: setup and customization

What are campaign leaderboards?

Leaderboards add a competitive, motivating element to your campaigns by ranking affiliations, designations, or other groups based on donor count, total raised, or participation rate. They're especially popular on Giving Days and tiered campaigns where friendly competition drives engagement.

How leaderboards work

Leaderboards pull data from gifts made to your campaign in real time. Each gift is attributed to one or more affiliations (like Athletics, College of Arts & Sciences, or Class of 2015), and the leaderboard ranks those affiliations based on the metric you choose:

• Donor count — Number of unique donors (most common for Giving Days)
• Total raised — Dollar amount raised by each affiliation
• Participation rate — The percentage calculated for the selected group or goal.

Setting up a leaderboard

1. Find the Leaderboard section
2. Choose your ranking metric (donor count, total raised, or participation rate)
3. Select which affiliations or groups should appear

4. Configure display settings to choose how many entries to display (10, 25, 50, or 100), hide the dollars-raised column if desired, and show goals and percentage-to-goal columns.

Leaderboards on tiered campaigns

If you're running a tiered campaign (e.g., a university-wide Giving Day with college and department pages), leaderboards can appear at each tier. Key things to know:

• Gifts roll up. A gift on a Tier 2 page counts toward the Tier 1 leaderboard too.
• Affiliation-based ranking. If a donor selects multiple affiliations, their gift may count toward multiple groups—this is by design.
• Percentages over 100%. Overlapping affiliations can cause total percentage to exceed 100%. This is expected behavior, not a bug.

For more on counting rules, see Understanding Counting Rules for Campaigns, Tiered Pages & Leaderboards.

Adjusting leaderboard totals

To manually adjust a leaderboard (e.g., for offline gifts or incorrect affiliations):

1. Adjust the dollar or donor counts for the designation or affiliation the leaderboard is associated to. You can enter negative numbers to lower the count. 

2. Make your adjustment as incremental changes. Example: entering "5" will add 5 donors, it will NOT set the count to 5 donors.

Note- adjustments here will also impact tiered landing pages! 

Leaderboard data is cached and may require a few minutes to update.

Tips for effective leaderboards

• Use donor count for Giving Days. It emphasizes participation, making every gift feel equally valuable.
• Keep it visible. Place it prominently so visitors see the competition immediately.
• Seed with early momentum. Add offline commitments before launch so the board doesn't start at zero.
• Communicate the rules. Let advocates know how rankings work so they can rally their communities.

Can I hide a leaderboard and reveal the results later?

Yes. You can unpublish and republish a leaderboard at any time, including after the campaign ends. Unpublishing does not delete the leaderboard or stop it from tracking qualifying gifts. When you republish it, the standings include qualifying gifts received while it was unpublished, according to the leaderboard’s configured rules. The results are not frozen at the moment you unpublish it.

To hide the standings for the final days of a competition and reveal them afterward:

1. Open Campaign Settings → Motivation & Sharing → Leaderboards → Manage Custom Leaderboards.
2. Find the leaderboard and click Unpublish. It moves to Draft and is no longer displayed publicly.
3. When you are ready to reveal the results, return to the same list and click Publish.
4. Open the public campaign page to view the standings. Allow the results to refresh after publishing.

For a tiered landing page’s leaderboard, use that page’s Custom Leaderboards list and its Unpublish or Publish action.

Can admins see the standings while the leaderboard is unpublished?

No. There is no backend view or private preview of the unpublished leaderboard standings. Admins can still manage the leaderboard’s settings, but the leaderboard itself can only be viewed on the public page when it is published. Publishing it to check the standings also makes it visible to visitors.

Unpublishing an individual leaderboard is separate from hiding the entire Donors section. If you previously hid that section, make it visible again under Campaign Setup → Images & Display → Page Layout so the published leaderboard can appear.