How to Save Time With Fundraising Campaign Templates

If your nonprofit runs a campaign series, race or endurance event, or a multi-city or partner peer-to-peer fundraising platform, a Classy Fundraising Campaign Template is about to make your life much easier. Below, we break down five pro tips to get you started.

See Templates in Action

A large-scale campaign with a broad reach to pull in the most support possible for your cause requires a lot of time and creativity. Turning that effort into a Campaign Template unlocks the potential to host more campaigns creating greater efficiency and more control than ever before. You’ve always been able to duplicate a campaign in Classy, but the launch of Campaign Templates will help scale your long-term fundraising strategy.

A campaign template gives you:

• The ability to create a foundation for multiple campaigns
• An option to lock branding and content that stays consistent across campaigns
• Complete transfer of campaign details between the template and child campaigns
• The ability to make small changes easily across multiple campaigns at once

Learn how to use Classy’s fundraising campaign templates to expand the possibilities of your fundraising efforts and make your day a whole lot easier.

How Classy’s Fundraising Templates Save You Time and Control

Nonprofits can now use our new Campaign Template feature. You can use a template to create a foundation for multiple campaigns with the same look and feel. For example, you might host an endurance event with a unique campaign for 40 participating cities. You can also easily create a template to set your campaign imagery, event content, custom questions, promo codes, email content, and branding.

Once your foundation is complete, you can publish your template so that each city can create child campaigns from that template. The child campaigns can then customize their unique event elements specific to their cities like location, date, time, fundraising goal, and more. You can also choose to lock branding, content, imagery, and more at the template level so that all associated campaigns are consistent.

The benefit of starting with a template is that you can perfect your campaign layout look and feel, and you have centralized control over any inevitable changes that need to be made across associated child campaigns. If you add a new custom question or update a sponsor, you can edit the Template and publish them across all 50 campaigns in just a few clicks.

Your nonprofit will gain back time and avoid updating campaigns individually for inevitable changes to a series to invest in other donation-driving priorities.

Explore More Time-Saving Hacks for Fundraising

Use case: create consistent templates across chapters

Federated or chapter-based organizations can use a campaign template for their main donation form or annual peer-to-peer campaign as an efficient way to onboard new chapters. Share templates with a newly onboarded account to create their chapter’s campaign for complete brand consistency. You’ll be able to control exactly what can be edited at the chapter level based on your preferences.

How Fundraising Campaign Templates Scale Efficiency

Campaign Templates will help nonprofits create a foundation for fundraising efforts by providing them:

• Ease of use: Create a campaign template as the starting point for hundreds of campaigns without calling on Classy’s professional services
• More time and resources: Create a foundation for your multi-city events and large-scale campaigns, so you always have somewhere to begin
• Brand consistency: Lockdown campaign colors, imagery, content, and branding elements that you want to remain consistent across your events or campaigns
• Streamlined campaign edits: Add or edit your template and push changes like a new promo code or custom question to hundreds of campaigns in minutes, viewing updates in near real-time
• Collaboration across accounts: Share templates across your multi-chapter, foundation-based organization or develop a foundation for training and onboarding team members with a consistent campaign look and feel

Use case: Create an annual giving campaign template

Are Fundraising Campaign Templates Right for You?

Do you host run/walk/ride or events that span multiple locations and partners?

Use Classy ticketed, Registration with Fundraising events, or even peer-to-peer campaigns to manage a series of branded events in different locations. You may use identically-branded Registration with Fundraising campaigns that only require you to swap out the event location, dates, sponsor information, and local contact information. You could also use a template for your peer-to-peer campaigns, swapping out the headline and changing some text in the appeal section.

Do you work with multiple partners, corporations, or universities?

Set up peer-to-peer or crowdfunding campaigns for each partner, corporation or university to manage and ensure brand consistency. You have the freedom to create a Classy campaign for community partners, corporate sponsors, or individuals and families to leverage for any use case they need.

We’ve seen organizations create campaigns administered by families or individuals using pages already set up with primary branding and the ability to fill in the text and personalized photos in certain sections. In contrast, other campaigns remain locked for brand consistency. Some organizations provide campaign pages for community groups to fundraise on their behalf or partner with universities to host a large-scale event series.

Do you host a campaign series?

Create pages to control elements of your campaigns if you’re already using many Classy donation pages for appeals across email, social media, or digital ads. We’ve seen organizations create new donation pages as various calls to action (CTAs) in emails, videos, and web ads. Typically, these donation pages have a consistent header and background image.

Is your team part of a chaptered organization or foundation?

Maintain consistency and brand control across multiple accounts. Templating can be used to create an annual peer-to-peer campaign, walk series, and donation form(s). Some organizations use this when new chapters are onboarded to Classy so they can create their campaigns off of the template, avoiding the need to look back at style guides for branding and content consistency.

See How Camp Kesem Saved Over 100 Hours With Templates

5 Pro Tips to Create Your Campaign Template in Classy

1. Build It: In Classy, there is a new “Templates” tab that lives in the side navigation bar where you can create a template based on an existing campaign. The “Pages” and “Email” sections will be carried over from the campaign you select, including all copy and design. Once you publish your template, you can create campaigns off of it right away.
2. Organize It: All campaigns you create based on a particular template will be accessible from a “Campaigns From Template” tab to see them together easily. From there, you can make changes to your template and see exactly which campaign will reflect the edits. You can also just as easily detach campaigns from a template.
3. Measure It: You’ll be able to see the transaction volume of each campaign associated with particular templates in one place, so you can determine which ones to continue replicating for future campaigns and which ones you should tweak to make more effective. Identify which fundraisers in a peer-to-peer campaign move toward their goals and which aren’t. You can target outreach to these slow-moving fundraisers as a result. You can also use a template to A/B test specific elements of your donation page. Look at everything from your appeal language to your CTA while keeping other campaign elements consistent. When you create multiple versions of the same donation page, you can easily see which variations lead to the most donations. You’ll be able to more clearly pinpoint what resonates with your unique donor base as a result.
4. Lock It: You have full control over what you choose to lock in your template such as content and branding. All associated child campaigns will not have the ability to edit fields that are locked at the Template level which gives you complete control over your brand.
5. Share It: Templates can be shared across connected accounts in Classy through a “Share Settings” tab to save time among various chaptered organizations or among teams who run similar campaigns. This gives everyone involved the benefits of measuring campaigns against common benchmarks and easily tweaking for success.

Put Fundraising Campaign Templates to Work

Learn more about templates on Classy in our support article. Dedicate the time to create your campaign templates now to save hours of campaign building in the future. That, in turn, will free you up to focus on other areas to drive more support for your mission.

Learn how to get access today.