How it works

The campaign itself is an old idea: a lot of people each raise a little toward a figure of their own, and you give each of them something to put in front of the people they know. What usually sinks it is the bookkeeping — who gave through whom, which sign is out of date, and who has time to work it out in December. That is the part this handles.

What is built, and what is not.

This page describes a campaign as the tool runs it today. Where a part is not built yet, the section says so plainly rather than leaving you to find out — so where a section does not say otherwise, it works now.

What working code does not cover: no campaign has run on this end to end yet, and the first will be in 2027. That is the thing to weigh before you plan around it, and about sets out what being this early costs you and what offsets it.

A word about words. This page says participant because the machinery does not care whether that is a hardware store, a scout troop, a ball team or a Sunday school class. Where the difference actually shows, there are examples of two kinds side by side.

What you need before you start

A Zeffy account. Zeffy is a donation processor that is free for nonprofits, and it holds the money. If you already use it, you are most of the way there.
A list of participants to sign up. It almost always exists already as a spreadsheet; it imports as one.
People willing to make the ask. Five names each is the usual shape of it. The software cannot do this part and does not pretend to.

What you do not need: a developer, a web person, a design budget, or anybody's permission to change a page mid-campaign.

Signing people up

Import the list and assign names to whoever is doing the asking. Each participant moves along a pipeline — prospect, asked, committed, kit delivered, active, goal met — so “five names each” is something you can see rather than something that was promised at a meeting in September.

Everyone doing the asking sees their own list and marks their own outcomes. Nobody has to ring round to find out where things stand.

A business giving campaign: Board members take five local employers each. The pipeline is how you find out in week two that nobody has called the hospital.
A troop or a team: The participants are already a roster, so the list is the roster. What you are tracking is who has set a figure and who has their sign.

The kit

Once a participant commits to a figure, the tool generates their kit as print-ready PDFs at 8.5 × 11, with the QR code at print resolution rather than a screenshot of one:

A counter sign with their name, their goal and their QR code.
A flyer — for the break room, the noticeboard, the church hall, the kit bag.

Download one participant's kit, or the whole campaign as a single file to take to the printer.

Not built yet: the leave-behind. A one-page sheet to hand over when the ask is first made is the obvious third document, and it is not written. Today the ask is made with whatever you already use, and the kit is printed once the figure is agreed.

How a gift finds its way back

This is the part that goes wrong in a spreadsheet, so it is worth being precise about.

Each participant gets their own donation form in Zeffy, and their QR code opens that form. Because the form belongs to them, the gift identifies them by itself. The donor is not asked to pick anyone from a list, so the donor cannot get it wrong.

Where two participants share a form — a late signup, a shared storefront, two siblings in the same troop — the form carries a required question, “Who sent you?”, and the answer is matched on the way in. An exact match first, then a match that forgives capitals, punctuation and spacing, and then nothing: an answer that does not match lands in a queue for a person to settle in one click.

It never guesses. A gift credited to the wrong participant is worse than a gift that waits a day for a human, because the first one is wrong on a sign, in a report, and at the awards night, and nobody finds out.

Cash and cheques

Small-town giving is not all online. A cheque handed over at the counter, or a twenty pressed on a scout at the door, has to reach that participant's total like any other gift, or the number on the sign starts drifting from the number in the tin.

Not built yet.

A gift record already carries where it came from, so a cash gift fits the shape without anything being invented — but there is no screen for entering one, so today it would be a cheque banked in Zeffy and a line in a spreadsheet.

This is the gap we would most like to hear about before building it, because how you take cash now decides what the screen should ask for. Receipting would not move either way: Zeffy issues the tax receipt, as it does for a card gift.

What the public sees

Every participant has a page of their own: name, goal, running total, what that total has funded, and a button to give. The campaign has a page above them all with the overall total and everyone taking part. A card gift through Zeffy reaches both pages inside a quarter of an hour and usually much sooner, because Zeffy tells us as it happens and a nightly sweep picks up anything that announcement missed. Nobody edits a web page during a campaign, and the number on the sign is never contradicted by the number online.

A leaderboard is available and is switched off by default. Competition suits some campaigns and sours others — it is usually a feature between businesses and a liability between eleven-year-olds — and that is a decision for the person who knows the people involved.

Donors are not listed publicly unless they ask to be, and when they do, it is a first name.

Recognition

A participant who reaches their figure is marked as having done so, on their page and along the pipeline, and a tier — the usual bronze, silver and gold, with whatever each is worth at your event — is recorded against them rather than kept in somebody's head. The recognition is the thing they are actually getting for the effort, so it should not depend on anybody remembering in January.

A business giving campaign: Logo on the event signage, a mention in the press release, a plaque for the wall by the register.
A troop or a team: The patch, the pizza party, the name read out. Same field, different answer.

Partly built. A participant can be put in a tier, but the tiers themselves have no screen yet — today they would be set up for you — and the end-of-campaign summary to hand the board is not written. Neither changes the shape of anything above.

What it does not do

A short list, kept short deliberately.

It never handles money. No card details reach it, and no percentage comes out of a gift.
It is not a shop. If your campaign sells something, the catalogue, the stock and the fulfilment are Zeffy's side of the line, not ours. We do participants, codes, attribution, progress and recognition.
It is not a donor database. No pledge reminders, no recurring giving management, no email marketing. If you want to send a newsletter, send a newsletter.
It does not do events, grants or volunteers.
It does not replace Zeffy, now or later. It is the layer on top that does the parts Zeffy does not do.

The one manual step, stated plainly

Zeffy's API cannot create a donation form, so each participant's form is made by hand in the Zeffy dashboard. For twenty participants that is an afternoon, once. The tool chases it rather than letting it slip: a participant who has committed but has no form yet is counted on the dashboard, can be filtered to, and cannot have a kit printed. A sign whose QR code opens nothing is worse than no sign at all.

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