What's the difference between campaigns & giving forms?
When do you need to use one versus the other?
The Basics
⭐ Harness campaigns are the "funding bucket" that allows you to create a more targeted "call to action" and/or to track donations towards a specific initiative more clearly.
Campaigns can be used as "designations" (ex: program/service/territory you serve) or as "special fundraising events/initiatives" (ex: GivingTuesday or urgent need fundraiser).
✅ Harness giving forms are the "customizable fundraising view/experience" you want your donors to experience when making a donation - whether that's to an unrestricted/undesignated fund or a specific campaign fund.
If you want to make any customizations at all to your Harness fundraising page (ex: customize the dollar amount, require certain fields of data, etc.), you'll want to create a giving form.
More Detail
By default, your fundraising pages are built to receive unrestricted/undesignated funds and will feature either Harness' standard/default settings (ex: giving types and dollar amounts) OR what you have featured in your default giving form.
But...
If you want to give your donors the ability to make a donation towards a specific program/service you offer or if you want to more easily "track" donations given as the result of a certain special event (ex: GivingTuesday), you can quickly & easily create a campaign which will usually automatically appear as a drop-down option for donors to give to on your donation pages. ⭐
If you want to make any customizations at all to your fundraising page (ex: customize the dollar amount, require certain fields of data, etc.), you'll want to create a giving form. ✅
Examples
Here's an example of a partner who created a campaign (2020-2021 Community Campaign) to more easily track donations, but didn't need a custom giving form because the donation types (one-time, monthly, round-ups) and the donation amounts ($10, $25, $50, $100) featured in their default giving form were ok to feature for their campaign:
Here's an example of a partner who created a campaign (Circle of Hope) to more easily track their monthly donors, and created a custom giving form because they wanted to ask for specific dollar amounts ($25, $50, $100, $250) and specific gift types (Monthly & Round-Ups, no One-Time) which was different than the "general" donation options they wanted their donors to have.
How To
Check out how to create a campaign & custom giving form 🎥👇