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Post campaign updates and documents#

Two panels, two jobs. **Updates** is where you write plain-text progress posts. **Documents** is where you publish files donors download. They are independent — a campaign can carry documents with no updates, or the other way round — and each one owns the switch that shows or hides its own tab on the public page.

Where the panels are#

Both panels appear in two places, and they are the same editor either way — whatever you do in one shows up in the other:

  • On the campaign record — open a fundraising campaign and go to the Updates & Documents tab.
  • In the Fundraisers console — open a campaign as a tab and add its Updates and Documents sections from the strip under the header.

Everything below can be done from either place. You never need the campaign's Related tab, and you never pick a "type" — the panel you are in decides that for you.

Write an update#

  1. Click ＋ Add update.
  2. Give it a Title. It is the headline a donor reads in the timeline, so make it specific — "Trail restoration begins on the eastern ridge", not "Update 3".
  3. Write the Update body. It is plain text: line breaks are kept, formatting is not. Write as much as you like.
  4. Set the Date to the date the thing happened, not the date you wrote it up. Donors see this date, and a timeline that jumps around reads as if it were backfilled.
  5. Leave Published off if you want to come back to it, or switch it on to go live.
  6. Save.

Every row in the list carries its own Publish / Unpublish button, a pencil to edit, and — if your permission set allows deleting posts — a cross to remove one. Drafts stay in the list with a Draft tag so a half-written update is never lost from view.

Publish a document#

A document is created in two steps, because a file needs a record to attach to before it can be uploaded.

  1. Click ＋ Add document.
  2. Title it the way a donor would ask for it — "2025 audited accounts", "Where your $50 goes". The title is the only label on the download card.
  3. Set the Date and, if you want it pinned, the Order. Then Save — the document is saved as a draft.
  4. The panel moves straight on to the upload step. Drop the file in, or browse for it. PDF, Office, CSV, text and image files are accepted.
  5. Click Done, then Publish on the row.

Until a file is attached, the row shows a No file tag and its Publish button stays disabled. That is deliberate: the public download card is a link wrapped around the file, so publishing one with nothing behind it would put a card on your page that looks live and does nothing.

To replace a file later, use Replace file on the row and upload a new one. The old file's download link stops working, and the old file itself is deleted if it was uploaded to this document and is attached nowhere else (see Unpublishing and deleting). The row and the public card only ever show one file, so a superseded file left serving would be invisible to you while its link went on handing the wrong document to anyone who kept it. If the new file could not be published (see below), the old one is left exactly as it was.

Attaching the file is the whole of it. Behind the scenes, the package mints a public download link for the file and stores it on the post, together with the file's type and size — that is what the row's file tag and size read back, and what the public card uses.

It has to work this way round because a website visitor has no permission to read a Salesforce file at all. The link is resolved once, by you, and the public page just plays back what was stored.

Use Open the file donors download on any row to check the exact link a donor gets.

Who can publish a file#

A download link is only minted when all of these hold for the person who uploads the file:

  • They have the Salesforce permission "Create Public Links". This is a platform permission, not a package one, so no package permission set can carry it. The standard Standard User, Marketing User and System Administrator profiles include it; Minimum Access and most custom profiles built from it do not. Add it under the user's profile or a permission set of your own: System Permissions → Create Public Links (Salesforce Help).
  • They can edit the document post and can see its campaign under your org's sharing.
  • The post is a document. A file dropped on an update is attached but never published.

When the permission is missing, the Documents panel says so at the top before anything is uploaded. If a file is uploaded anyway, it stays attached to the post but gets no link, so its Publish button stays disabled. Ask someone who has the permission to use Replace file.

A published file is public to anyone with the URL

The download link is permanent and public: anyone holding it can open the file, whether or not the post is published and whether or not they came from your page. Treat "attach it here" as "publish it to the internet", and keep anything you would not hand to a stranger out of a document post.

Showing and hiding the whole section#

Each panel has a Show updates on the public page / Show documents on the public page switch at the top. It is the same per-campaign toggle described in Sections and the contact band, surfaced where you are working so you do not have to go looking for it on the campaign's fields.

Turn it off and the tab disappears from the public page even if there are published posts behind it. Publishing a post while the switch is off puts it nowhere — the panel's caption says so rather than leaving you to find out.

Where they show up#

Both types land in the tabbed well under the story on the campaign's public page — documents in Documents, updates in Updates. A tab renders only when it is switched on and has something published behind it, and each tab carries its own count.

Controlling the order#

Within a tab, posts are ordered by Order first and then by Date, newest first.

Leave Order blank and you get pure date ordering, which is what you want almost always — a blank sorts after every numbered post, so an unordered timeline is never pushed below a single pinned item.

Fill it in only to pin something to the top: give that one post a low number (1) and leave the rest blank. The annual report that should sit above the newsletters, the venue map that should be the first thing a ticket-holder sees.

Unpublishing and deleting#

Unpublish drops a post out of its tab immediately, and if it was the last one there, the tab goes with it. Nothing is deleted, so you can put it back with Publish.

Delete is permanent, and asks first. The public download link stops working either way, which is the point: a link left behind would go on serving the file to anyone who kept the URL. What happens to the file itself depends on where it came from:

  • Uploaded to this document and attached nowhere else: the file is deleted with the post.
  • Also attached elsewhere (the campaign record, a library, another document post): the file is only detached from this post and stays where else it lives. If another document post still serves the same link, that link keeps working for that post.

Where to go next#