What is a Community Page in Big River? Community pages are different pre-made templates that you as the user can easily put together that will allow you to get your fundraiser and message out to a very large group of people. It's very similar to crowdfunding, but you have a large amount of control over how this can be administered and by whom. So what's the purpose? Big River's Community templates are aimed at really telling your story(s) and meeting the goals you set to reach and it opens up your fundraising outside of the traditional donor base you normally have. You can heavily use social media marketing, multiple team and teammates and several partners to knock the ball out of the park for your campaigns! So here's how to get started.
First step is to log into your Big River Production Account
Click the Community Tab
Click New Fundraiser:
There are several different types of community fundraisers. Choose the one that best describes what you're trying to accomplish.
In this case, I chose Crowdfunding:
Then Hit create
You will now be on your Basics Editing Tab. You'll need to save the campaign first before you can move onto creating your community page. You can also name it at this point as well.
Now that you've saved, this should look familiar to you if you've created an event or a page in Big River. First tab is the basics tab. Here you can add in the description that the public will see. Be as short or as long as you'd like.
Make sure you change your status to Public (or turn it to that at some point to be shown live to the public). While in draft/test, you can still preview your work as you continue to update.
Next you should choose a date to start the community event and to end the event:
Lastly, you should upload an image that coordinates with your campaign like your company logo, or something that's been created for this community event.
Then save your progress at this point before you move onto designing the look for your fundraiser.
Next piece to your community fundraiser is to create the engagement and stories portion of the look and feel. The steps below here will help you with creating how your campaign will be run by you or your teams (we will get into that shortly).
The first piece of this is to choose how this campaign will get donations.
First choice you have is to enable the splash page (which is your landing page for your donors to actually donate online) with no other boxes checked. That box will be checked immediately. If you uncheck it, you won't have a splash page. So don't uncheck it. This choice means you will need to send the link of your crowdfunding page to every person you want to donate. If you're planning on emailing to your entire donor base to donate, this will work very well. But this won't allow anyone to create teams and send out to solicit more donations.
The next choice you have is to check the box for Enable Community-Based Fundraising. This will allow people to then fundraise on your behalf. High level on this is that they will be able to share your information on Social Media or use the link to ask others to come donate to your crowdfunding campaign.
The third choice you have is to now allow teams to create their own fundraiser within your fundraiser. This choice is great if you're really looking for community support or partnering with other companies. These groups and companies can create their own goal to help you reach your goal and gets many people working for you to reach the ultimate donation amount for your fundraiser. You have three choices for how they can create their teams: Open Enrollment, Invite Only and Closed Enrollment. If team fundraising is enabled, open team enrollment status controls how users join teams. Closed Teammate Enrollment means that all teams are invite only. Open Teammate Enrollment forces all teams to allow any teammate to join. Let the Team Leader Decide (Invite Only) leaves the choice to team leaders to set the team to closed or invite only. You can also set the maximum amount of teams that can participate per company or team. If you want only 4 teams per company, then choose 4 as the maximum number of teams allowed per fundraising organizations.
The last option is to Enable Teammate pages. If you do that, that means each fundraising company's team leader has invited teams to join in fundraising and will now allow the teammates to create fundraisers on their own within that group. Same rules apply as in number 3 above. You have three choices for how they can create their teams: Open Enrollment, Invite Only and Closed Enrollment. If team fundraising is enabled, open team enrollment status controls how users join teams. Closed Teammate Enrollment means that all teams are invite only. Open Teammate Enrollment forces all teams to allow any teammate to join. Let the Team Leader Decide (Invite Only) leaves the choice to team leaders to set the team to closed or invite only. You can also set the maximum amount of teams that can participate per company or team. If you want only 4 teams per company, then choose 4 as the maximum number of teams allowed per fundraising organizations.
The next part of this is stories (which aren't necessary, but can really help be drivers to get the public to understand what you're fundraising for). Some examples of a story could be that you are fundraising on behalf of the Cancer Society. You can create stories of 3-5 people who are struggling to pay for the treatment they need to become cancer free. These stories can be used by each team to start their fundraiser for. An Example of this can be seen here. In this example, they used this video inside their stories section and can be one example of a story any of your teams can use to start their campaigns. So how do I create a story?
First thing you need to do is click Add Story
Next, you're going to want to name your story, Give it a short internal description if you want, add in every piece of content you can like images, verbiage, videos etc...to really make this story pull at the donors and add an image to the story if you want (isn't necessary):
The next thing you are going to want to do is add in your price (or what they will donate to you). In order to add a new price, you need to click the + sign to your right as seen below:
Step 1 you need to choose the price you need for this which in this case, will be a fixed price. Where the red circle is, you can drop down to choose other methods of pricing, but for now, we will stick with fixed pricing. Step 2 is to put any number you want that price to be in the box next to 2. I chose 200. Then hit create.
If you have trouble with the pricing, please click here to help guide you through.
Your item will now appear at the bottom:
And your story will now appear ready to be used after you hit create at the bottom left. It will be a finished story looking like this on your stories tab:
Next thing you will get into is your Splash page. You want this to be your full message. This will be different from your story. This will be the main page information and should really dive into the Fundraiser really is all about:
As you can see, take notice of all the information in there. There are several ways to use rich text and merge tags to create a vibrant message. Really take your time with this and make it beautiful. Make sure to save once you've completed your content in the Splash Page.
The next step is to get the checkout page ready for anyone who's going to be donating to you. This is the area where you need to add the donation items for your donors to choose from. Similar to adding an item like we did above, you will do that again. It will look like this once you complete adding the amounts for the donor to choose:
So how do you create a selection as brand new? Here are the steps to make that happen:
Click Add Item and a new box will appear to add information into it. First thing you need to do is similar to what you did in the story. Create a Donation Item (because you want them to donate to you), name it internally and use the Form Label for what people will see publicly and add a very strong description with all the information we put in there (really make it donor centric). This isn't necessary, but some people like to do that. You can add an image to this, but it's not necessary either:
The next thing you are going to want to do is add in your price (or what they will donate to you). In order to add a new price, you need to click the + sign to your right as seen below:
Step 1 you need to choose the price you need for this which in this case, will be a fixed price. Where the red circle is, you can drop down to choose other methods of pricing, but for now, we will stick with fixed pricing. Step 2 is to put any number you want that price to be in the box next to 2. I chose 200. Then hit create.
Lastly, the new price is ready to be added as an item. To make this official, hit Create:
Your item will now appear at the bottom:
You can move the item up or down using the arrows in the picture above. The double arrows move this item straight to the top or the bottom of your items page. The one arrows move up or down just one position on your items list.
The other tabs below the checkout three of the tabs are not necessary for you to make any updates to at all unless you want to add custom fields (which can add additional questions and requirements for the donor to do at checkout. An example could be that you need a waiver added that requires the donor to acknowledge they understand what it says and check the box before completing the checkout). Adding a fee to the checkout to cover your credit card fees. This will ask the donor to cover these when they are ready to complete the checkout. Updating the already pre-populated contact options for the donor to put into their checkout information (like their name, phone number, email etc...). You can add your own custom contact fields if you like, but they aren't necessary and any changes to those contact fields aren't necessary.
The one that you will need to change is your payment options. You'll just need to remove the payment methods you don't take as your methods you take will already be in your account. To remove them, simple hit the X button on the far right to delete the payment method
Next thing you need to do is create a confirmation page that your donors will see once they complete their online transaction. You will automatically have one that you don't need to change at all. Using that will be perfect to start. It can be changed using dynamic merge tags. As it is, it's already currently ready for any confirmation page:
Go ahead and move onto the next tab you need to edit which is Email Templates.
Email templates are a very important part of what your donors and fundraisers will receive for completed donations, inviting donors to donate, inviting new teams and fundraisers etc...In this section, we will show you how to make changes if you'd like on what everyone will see when you send an email.
One of the things that you need to understand is that some of your emails will be ready for you immediately if you want to keep them that way. They are populated for you with generic templates so you are ready to start your campaign immediately. The receipt email will be generic like the one in the confirmation page and the activation email will be generic as well to tell them they can login now. See the pictures below:
Receipt Email:
All of these emails will be similar to this, but just targeted for different groups of people.
The last thing you need to do is update the SEO/Social Settings for when your donors or teams want to share the campaign on Facebook, Twitter and Email.
First thing to do is create a nice title for the share on social media. You can keep what is already there, but make it unique to you.
Make a short description so that when it's being shared, it will have a cool message that's impactful. Don't go overboard on the description as it will be too long for the social screen cap.
Upload an image. It's very important to have one so that the social shares look very professional and impactful.
Last, check all the boxes you want the sharing to happen. Most everyone checks Facebook, Twitter and Email. Google+ is no longer relevant and will be removed as an option in the near future.
Save your work.
You are now ready to send this link out to your donors to start donating to your community page and here is an example that you can repeat for any type of your community fundraising pages to receive donations.
Now Save, Preview and Publish
This is the entire process for you to create a community fundraiser and then help your teams bring funds into your goal. Please reach out to help@gobigriver.com if you still have questions about this process.