Skip to content

Core Concepts

Sections and the contact band#

Every public page has the same frame — the column ratio settles that. What varies from campaign to campaign is which sections fill it, and that is four checkboxes on the campaign record.

The four toggles#

They live on the campaign, in the Public Page section of the Fundraising Campaign layout. All four are on by default, on new campaigns and existing ones, so a campaign you never touch renders everything it has.

Toggle Controls Turn it off when
Show story The narrative in the wide column, under the hero. The appeal needs nothing but a payment form — a renewal link, a pledge page someone reached from an email that already made the case.
Show documents The Documents tab in the tabbed well. You have files attached that are for internal reference rather than donors.
Show updates The Updates tab in the same well. You are posting progress for staff but are not ready to show donors a timeline.
Show contact The full-width contact band across the foot of the page. Almost never — see below.

A section with nothing in it never renders#

The toggle is permission, not instruction. A section appears only when it is switched on and it has something to show:

  • Story needs the campaign's Story field to be non-blank.
  • Documents needs at least one published document post.
  • Updates needs at least one published update post.

So turning Show documents on before you have uploaded anything does nothing, and it stops doing nothing the moment you publish your first file. Nobody has to remember to come back and flip a switch.

The reason is worth stating plainly: an empty tab is worse than no tab. A tab bar is a promise that there is something behind each label. A donor who clicks Documents and finds a blank panel has learned that this page is not maintained — which is precisely the opposite of what the documents were there to prove.

FAQ has no toggle, and that is deliberate

Any FAQ selected on the campaign becomes a fourth tab in the same well. It has no on/off switch because it does not need one: an empty FAQ list is already an absent tab, and the selection is the switch. Deselect the FAQs and the tab goes.

Writing the story#

The Story field is Markdown, not rich text and not HTML. A donor sees:

Type this Get this
## Heading / ### Subheading A section heading, in the page's own type scale
**bold** / *italic* Emphasis
[link text](https://...) A link that always opens in a new tab
- item or 1. item A bullet or numbered list
> a line A pull quote, set off with the page's quote styling
--- on its own line A horizontal rule
![caption](image-url) An image, with the caption shown underneath
@[label](youtube:VIDEO_ID poster-url) An embedded video block

Anything the syntax above doesn't recognize — a stray <, a pasted HTML tag — shows up as the literal characters typed, not as markup. HTML has never been an accepted input in the Story field, and pasting it does not do anything harmful: it is just text on the page.

A story written before this change, as plain paragraphs with a blank line between them and an occasional line starting with > for a pull quote, is already valid Markdown and needs no rewrite — it renders exactly as it did.

The video block is a link to YouTube by default: a poster image with a play button that opens the video in a new tab, so a story never loads a third-party player without an admin's say-so. It only becomes a real inline player when the org has both switched on Play story videos on the page (Settings → General → Organization & Donations → Story media) and registered the matching CSP Trusted Site — see Third-party content.

For the toolbar, the full accepted syntax, where to host images and video, and the exact trusted-site recipe, see Write a campaign story.

The tabbed well#

Documents, Updates and FAQ share one tabbed area under the story. Only the tabs that survive the rules above are rendered, and the well itself disappears when none do. One tab renders as a single tab rather than as a bare panel — the label still tells a reader what they are looking at.

The order is fixed: Documents, Updates, FAQ. It is not configurable, because tab order is not a decision worth making per campaign, and a consistent order means a returning donor knows where to look.

Filling the well is covered in Post campaign updates and documents.

The contact band#

The band runs the full width of the page beneath both columns — it is not part of either column, and it is not the site footer. It carries how to reach a person: an email address, a phone number, opening hours, and for a ticketed event the venue address.

Each value resolves the same way, and the rule has one sentence: the campaign's value if it has one, the organization's otherwise.

Shown Campaign field Falls back to
Email Contact email override Settings → Organization → Contact email
Phone Contact phone override Settings → Organization → Support phone
Hours — Settings → Organization → Contact hours
Venue The event's venue and address fields — (ticketed events only)

Blank on the campaign means "use the org's", never "show nothing". A campaign where you fill in nothing at all still gets a complete band. Only fill an override in when this appeal is handled by someone other than your usual contact — a gala with its own coordinator, a disaster response with a dedicated line.

Hours have no campaign override on purpose. An appeal does not have its own office hours; the organization does. Adding an override would have been a field that is wrong to use in every case anyone could think of.

If both the campaign and the org leave email and phone blank, the band is omitted whatever the toggle says — a panel headed "Talk to a real person" with no way to reach one is worse than no panel. A venue on its own does not keep it: an address answers where, not who do I ask.

That also means Show contact is rarely the switch you want. Clearing the org defaults removes the band from every page at once, which is almost never the intent.

This is not your receipt reply-to

The contact email here is the address a donor is invited to write to before they give. The address receipts come from is separate, set with the rest of the receipt configuration. They are often the same address, but they are different jobs and changing one does not change the other.

Where to go next#