Digital fundraising campaign

How to create a digital fundraising campaign project in Asana

There are a few ways to create your campaign. To get started quickly:

1. Start with our digital fundraising campaign template and customize it for your organization’s needs.
2. Import an existing spreadsheet where you currently manage campaigns.

How to access all Asana templates

If you prefer to build your own campaign project from scratch, or want general best practices for Asana projects get started here.

Working with agencies?

For smooth fundraising campaigns, consider inviting any agencies you’re working with as guests into your project. That way, they can see your plan and you can set clear deadlines and keep track of deliverables.

Tips for managing your digital fundraising campaign project

Now that you’ve built your project, these tips will help you manage it as you launch new campaigns.

1. Map out your fundraising campaign (and adjust as things come up) with Timeline

Fundraising campaigns have lots of critical deadlines and dependencies. Use Timeline View to map out your campaign schedule and make it simple to determine what tasks should happen in which order. Here’s how:

1. Schedule tasks by drag and dropping them onto the timeline. If you spot timing conflicts, drag and drop tasks to reschedule them.
2. Extend the task date ranges so the assignee can better budget their time to work on it leading up to the deadline.
3. If tasks need to be completed in a certain order, create dependencies between them by hovering over a task, then dragging the dot to a related task.

2. Make approvals and task statuses clear with custom fields

Campaign managers can lose time trying to figure out what assets are approved, and where their team might be getting blocked. Adding approval and task progress custom fields can help you quickly understand where each task stands and home in on work that needs to be approved or anything at-risk of not hitting a deadline.

Sort your project by custom fields to quickly spot blockers and task statuses. It’s like using spreadsheet column sorting.

How to manage approvals

To stay on top of work as it moves through the process, you can turn on custom field notifications and add the "Approval Stage" custom field to your project. Then, when a campaign asset gets marked as “Ready to Review," the approver will receive an Inbox notification and know it’s ready.

3. Collect donor testimonials and stories with forms

Collecting donor testimonials brings your nonprofit’s work to life and inspires others to contribute to your cause. Reaching out later on can take time or lead to lots of back and forth via email. Instead, you can easily capture their stories in the format you need by creating a form to fill out.

Once submitted, the forms turn into a task that you can categorize with custom fields so you always have the right quote or story to share whether it’s via email or your social channels. This is an easy way to showcase supporters and build more momentum.

Tips for reporting on digital fundraising campaign progress

1. Make progress clear across your team with project status updates

Instead of getting pinged by someone asking for a status update, cobbling it together, and sending an email that leads to more questions, meetings, and confusing threads, simply post and share progress with status updates. Make sure key stakeholders of your campaign are members of your project so that anytime you publish an update, all project members get notified in Inbox. You can also loop members of cross-functional teams into the conversation by @mentioning them in a comment.

If you consistently use status updates, you can spend less time in status meetings and don’t need to send updates via email. Win-win!

2. Manage multiple campaigns at once with Portfolios

If you’re managing more than one campaign at a time, then you’ll love seeing progress and updates with Portfolios. Portfolios give you real-time overviews of progress and make it easy to request updates so you can focus on what needs your attention.

3. Surface blocked work and task progress across multiple campaigns with advanced search reports

If you’re using task progress and approval custom fields in your fundraising campaign projects, you can keep track of any at-risk work and approvals across these projects by creating advanced search reports.

So if you wanted to see a list of all approved work across campaigns, or show all tasks that aren’t started yet with a deadline in the next three days, you can create and save these as advanced search reports.

If you want to run the same report often, you can save the report. You could run your report every Friday to prioritize for Monday and keep your campaign on track.