A Pledge campaign is built for events where students sign up as participants and collect donations from friends and family: Fun Runs, Read-A-Thons, Jog-A-Thons, and anything similar. If you just want to ask supporters for money without students fundraising individually, use a Donation Drive instead.

Building One

1. In the Admin, navigate to Campaigns > Fundraisers.
2. Click the Build Campaign button.
3. Choose Pledge.
4. Pick the organization the donations should go to, then fill in the details.
5. Choose a Challenge Type — see below.

Once the campaign exists, open it with the View button. A Pledge campaign has its own set of tabs: Participants, Leaderboard, Orders, Share, and Config (plus Service Activities if you chose the Service Challenge).

Pledge Settings

To change your pledge settings after the campaign is built, open the campaign, click Edit, and go to the Options tab. There you’ll find:

• Goal amount: the amount each participant should aim to raise. It’s shown on the campaign page. It is not the total the whole campaign should raise.
• Event Date: the day your fundraiser ends, not the day it starts. Participants see a countdown to this date, and reminder emails are scheduled from it. See The Event Date and Reminder Emails below.
• What kind of challenge is this?: the challenge participants do to earn their pledges. See Challenge Types below.

Click Advanced settings to see more:

• Donation Amounts: up to four amounts donors can choose from. Click the star on one to have it picked for donors at checkout. Check Let donors enter a custom amount to let donors type their own amount.
• Track incentive points: turns on points participants earn. See Incentives below.
• Show donor wall: shows supporters’ names, donation amounts, and messages on each participant’s page.
• Email template participants send to friends and family: the message that goes out when a participant invites supporters. See Personalized Invite Emails below.

Click Save when you’re done.

The Event Date and Reminder Emails

The Event Date doesn’t close your campaign. Donations keep coming in after it until you close the campaign yourself:

1. Open the campaign and click Edit.
2. Go to the Availability tab. On a Pledge campaign, this tab has just one checkbox.
3. Check Mark campaign as not available for sale.
4. Click Save.

Once it’s closed, each participant’s page stays up and shows “This item is no longer available for sale.” Supporters can’t donate there, and families can’t sign up new participants. You can still record cash and check donations with Offline Donations (see Cash Receipts below). To reopen the campaign, uncheck the box and click Save.

Don’t use Sell in the online store on the Store tab to close a Pledge campaign. Unchecking it sends anyone who opens a participant’s link to your store’s home page with a “not found” message.

Two kinds of reminder emails use the Event Date:

• Family reminders: when a student signs up, their parents are scheduled two reminders, 5 days and 2 days before the Event Date. A student who signs up within 5 days of the Event Date isn’t scheduled any. If the campaign has no Event Date, the reminders go out 7 and 10 days after sign-up instead.
• Supporter reminders: friends and family who were invited but haven’t donated yet get a reminder every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until the Event Date.

If you change the Event Date after students have signed up, reminders already scheduled for those families keep their original dates, and none go out after the Event Date has passed. Families who sign up after the change are scheduled from the new date. Supporter reminders always follow the current Event Date.

Challenge Types

Every Pledge campaign runs one of three challenges, which decides what a participant does to earn their pledges. Pick one while building the campaign, or change it later: open the campaign, click Edit, go to the Options tab, and choose one under What kind of challenge is this?

• Activity Challenge: the classic setup. Participants take part in an event like a fun run, jog-a-thon, or dance-a-thon and collect pledges for it, with no extra tracking. This is the default for new Pledge campaigns.
• Reading Challenge: for read-a-thons. Participants log the minutes they read each day and watch their total climb toward a goal, on their Participant Dashboard.
• Service Challenge: participants earn their pledges by completing good deeds you pick, like helping a neighbor with yard work or collecting canned goods for a food bank, instead of a physical event.

Setting Up a Service Challenge

Choosing Service Challenge gives your campaign a starter list of 20 good deeds to pick from. Manage the list on the campaign’s Service Activities tab:

• Add Activity creates a new one; click any activity to edit or reorder it.
• Import loads a list from a CSV or Excel file with one column, the activity name. Check Remove the activities already on this list before importing if you want the file to fully replace the current list — participants who already picked a removed activity keep it, they just stop seeing it as an option for anyone new.
• Export downloads the current list as a CSV.
• Each activity shows how many participants selected it and how many have completed it.

Right after a family signs up for a Service Challenge campaign, each child is asked to choose at least three activities (or fewer if the campaign offers fewer than three) before their dashboard becomes available. From the Participant Dashboard, parents see their child’s chosen activities and mark each one done as it’s finished — nothing here is permanent, so both the choices and the completions can be changed at any time.

In the Admin, a participant’s chosen activities and completion status appear on their Participants page, where you can view and change them the same way a parent would. Service Challenge totals also appear in the participant export and on the Observer Dashboard.

Leaderboards

Leaderboards provide a convenient and easy way to create a friendly competitive spirit for your participants during your event. Leaderboards are not limited to the student’s grade and teacher. Create your own custom leaderboards to track donations. For example, a booster club might want to track by sport and whether the student is in Varsity or JV.

Leaderboards are managed on the campaign’s Leaderboard tab. Click Add Leaderboard and choose Grade, Teacher, or Custom.

What a Leaderboard Shows

A leaderboard ranks each grade, teacher, or custom item (not individual students) by Donations. For a Reading Challenge, you can also rank them by Reading Minutes.

On the campaign’s Leaderboard tab in the Admin, each row also shows a Participants count: how many students are on that grade, teacher, or item. For a Reading Challenge, use the Donations and Minutes tabs above the boards to switch between the two.

Families see the leaderboards on the Participant Dashboard, and school staff see them on the Observer Dashboard. The dashboards show each row’s name and total. Their totals always cover the whole campaign.

Leaderboards don’t list students and don’t rank by incentive points. To see each student’s points, open the Participants tab and sort by the Points column (shown when incentive points are turned on).

Totals for a Date Range

The Leaderboard tab has an Order Date filter at the top. Use it to see what each grade, teacher, or item raised over a set of days, like one week for a weekly class prize.

1. Open the campaign and click the Leaderboard tab.
2. Click Order Date and choose the dates you want.

The Donations totals change to cover only those dates. For a Reading Challenge, so do the Reading Minutes. The Participants count stays the same: it always counts every student on that grade, teacher, or item.

To download a board for the same dates, click its Actions button, then Export.

The date range only changes what you see on the Leaderboard tab. The Participant Dashboard and Observer Dashboard keep showing totals for the whole campaign.

Renaming a Custom Leaderboard

1. Open the campaign and click the Leaderboard tab.
2. On the custom leaderboard, click Actions, then Edit.
3. Change the Leaderboard Name. It can be up to 20 characters.
4. Click Save.

This name is the label families see on the sign-up form when they choose their item for that leaderboard. It is also the title of the board on the dashboards.

Putting Participants on a Leaderboard

During signup, each participant picks their grade, teacher, or custom item for each leaderboard. Participants who signed up before a leaderboard was added aren’t on it until you assign them. You can do that one at a time or all at once:

• One at a time: On the Participants tab, click View next to the student, then Edit. Choose their Grade, Teacher, or custom item and click Save.
• All at once: On the Participants tab, click Import and upload your roster with a column for each leaderboard (like Grade or Teacher). Students already in the campaign are updated, not added twice. See Importing a Roster below.

Notes

• Pledge campaigns can have, at most, two leaderboards.

Adding Participants

Participants can be added one at a time from the campaign’s Participants tab, or they sign themselves up during First Step. For a whole roster at once, import it instead.

Importing a Roster

Instead of adding students one by one, load your whole roster from a CSV or Excel file:

1. Open the campaign and click the Participants tab.
2. Click Import.
3. Download the sample file if you’d like a template built specifically for this campaign, fill it in, then choose your file and click Import.

Columns are matched by their heading rather than their position, so reordering columns in Excel won’t break the file. First Name, Last Name, and Parent Email are required on every row. Set up your leaderboards first (see above), then add a column named to match each one, like Grade, Teacher, or a custom board such as Homeroom, and fill it in for any student who belongs on it. Parent First Name and Parent Last Name are optional. The sample file is built from your campaign’s own leaderboards, so a campaign with a Homeroom board gets a Homeroom column in its sample.

Notes:

• Uploading the same roster again updates the students already in the campaign instead of adding them twice. A student is matched by their name together with their parent’s email, so two students who share a name stay two separate records. That is why the parent email is required.
• Each parent is emailed a welcome as soon as the import finishes, the same email they’d get if you added their student by hand.
• If a grade, teacher, or leaderboard entry in the file doesn’t match what’s set up on the campaign, the import stops, tells you which row and value need fixing, and changes nothing, so a typo can’t leave you with half a roster.

Participant Dashboard

The Participant Dashboard provides real-time information for the campaign including participant donations, leaderboards, share links, and more. Participants have the opportunity to invite friends and family to participate in the campaign via the dashboard.

Next to the text message share option, you’ll also find a QR code icon. Tap it to open a scannable QR code for the participant’s donation page, plus a Download button so it can be added to flyers, posters, or other printed materials. Anyone who scans it lands right on the donation page, ready to give.

Personalized Invite Emails

Under a campaign’s Advanced settings, you’ll find the email template participants send to friends and family. This is the message a parent’s email goes out with when they invite someone to support their fundraiser. Drop any of these macros into the message, and FutureFund fills them in automatically for every supporter’s email:

If a macro is misspelled, FutureFund will flag it with a clear message when you try to save, so a broken merge field never goes out in an email. Every new campaign starts with a warm, ready-to-use default message (available in all 7 of our supported languages), which you’re free to customize.

Participants can also personalize their own invite emails the same way when inviting friends and family individually from the Participant Dashboard.

Incentives

FutureFund’s Pledge campaign offers a comprehensive incentives system designed to enhance participation and boost donations. Here’s how it works. Participants earn points for the following actions:

These point values are the same for every Pledge campaign and can’t be changed, so choose your prize levels to fit them.

Points can be redeemed for rewards chosen by the fundraiser host, offering flexibility and added motivation for participants. Best of all, the tracking and management of these incentives are fully automated by FutureFund, eliminating the need for manual spreadsheets and simplifying the process for organizers.

Point ranges will vary, however, we typically see participants earn 250 - 1,000 points.

Observer Dashboard

The Observer Dashboard provides real-time information for the campaign including donation totals, leaderboards, share links, and more. This link does not require an account, i.e., it can be accessed without authenticating, and is intended to be shared with school personnel wanting a read-only view into the campaign.

The dashboard lists every participant by first and last name, with their leaderboard items, invites, and donation totals, plus points or reading minutes if you track them. Its Export button downloads a file that also includes each participant’s parent email and the answers from your sign-up form. Anyone with the link can see and download all of this, so share it only with trusted school staff.

This link should not be shared with participating parents.

Cash Receipts

Track cash and check donations for each participant in addition to online donations. In the Admin these are called Offline Donations. Each one you enter becomes an order and is reflected in reports, the parent dashboard, and leaderboards.

Recording Offline Donations for Many Participants

1. In the Admin, navigate to Campaigns > Fundraisers.
2. Click the View button next to the campaign.
3. Click Actions, then Offline Donations. The Actions menu is on the campaign’s page and on its Participants and Orders tabs.
4. On the Offline Donations page, find the student. Use the Participant Name search, or the Grade and Teacher filters if your campaign has those leaderboards. If a student isn’t on the list yet, click Add Participant.
5. Type the amount in the box at the end of the student’s row, then press Enter or click away from the box.

Each amount saves on its own, and a green check appears next to the box. There is no Save button on this page.

The Offline Donations column shows each student’s total so far. Every amount you enter is recorded as its own donation and added to that total, so entering an amount again adds another donation. It doesn’t replace the first one.

Recording an Offline Donation for One Participant

1. Open the campaign and click the Participants tab.
2. Click View next to the student.
3. Click Actions, then Offline Donations.
4. Enter the Amount.
5. Optionally, enter a Name for who gave it. When you enter a name, the participant is told about the donation.
6. Click Save.

If you don’t see Offline Donations in the Actions menu, your admin access may not allow changes.

Pledge campaigns aren’t listed in Build Order on the Orders page. Use Offline Donations to record donations for a pledge campaign.

Removing an Offline Donation

1. In the Admin, navigate to Campaigns > Fundraisers.
2. Click the View button next to the campaign.
3. Click on the Orders tab.
4. Click the View button next to the order.
5. Next to the line item in the Order Information section, click on the ellipsis button.
6. Click on the Remove option.

The order will remain in the system, however, it will be zeroed out and removed from any reports.