Personal Campaign Pages in CiviCRM

By owning our PCP system instead of using a third party, we have reduced our costs and increased automation within our processes. Plus they are super easy to set up by campaigners!

- Karen Sng-Sugden | Head of Systems & Information | Support through court

We helped Support Through Court (STC) to move all of their fundraising activities to CiviCRM to improve operational efficiency. STC was using Virgin Money Giving for fundraising while their main donation pages were using CiviCRM contribution pages. So it made sense to bring it all together and start using core personal campaign pages (PCP) instead. Now supporters of STC use PCP to run their own campaigns to raise funds for the organisation.

Personal Campaign Pages or PCPs are a feature in CiviCRM that empower supporters to raise funds on behalf of an organisation. CiviCRM allows individual supporters (or teams of supporters) to participate in peer-to-peer fundraising. Supporters establish a fundraising goal for their campaign, create public facing campaign page, and invite their peers to donate.

Our approach included reviewing the theming of the relevant pages, configuring relevant profiles needed across the pages and configuring any system messages to support the user journey. We started the project with discovery to understand the requirements of the organisation, the user needs and the technical possibilities of PCP in CiviCRM.

User Journey:

Upon considering the business processes of the organisation and the limitations of CiviCRM PCPs we began mapping out possible user journeys. By closely collaborating with the Head of Systems & Information - Karen Sng-Sugden, we mapped out the service model for running PCPs at STC.

Theming:

We adhered to STC’s brand guidelines while reviewing and applying themes to each step of the PCP, like setting up your account and campaign, the public facing pages, as well as the contribution forms and thank you page. We used Figma to create interactive mockups to facilitate conversation between teams. STC could use the mockup to comment and give feedback on the UX, edit the copy and user test the mock-ups internally before committing to any of the development.

Configuring relevant profiles:

CiviCRM's PCP requires user to create an account when creating their Personal Campaign page in order to be able to manage their page going forward. We worked closely with the STC team to agree on all the configurations necessary for their PCP pages, one of those was the profile we use when campaigners first create a page. Tailoring the pages to accommodate fields helped STC to capture relevant data when campaigners set up and maintained their PCP. Campaigners also have a dashboard to manage their campaign.

Configuring system messages:

Our service mapping exercise helped us identify the touch points for users and end users that needed customisation and improvements. We reviewed and enhanced various communications sent to campaigners and their donors. We improved formats of messages and wording for existing system workflow messages and other custom changes like disabling the end date for a campaign as per the organisation’s requirements. All customisation of messages and data handling adhered to GDPR compliance when passing on donor information to the campaigners.

CiviCRM Core Contribution:

During implementation of this project we encountered few bugs and the fixes have been sumitted to the upstream CiviCRM project.

• Add image upload support for PCP account: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/22223
• Support URL fixes: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/23287
• Show honor roll only if it's enabled for the PCP page: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/23567

Testing:

We did end-to-end run-throughs from a campaigner's point of view to test every field, the wording, the email communications received and ironed out all quirks before going live.

If you don’t already you could consider CiviCRM’s PCP as your next online fundraising strategy and allow your supporters to create their own campaings  on your site. All and any feedback is welcome and if you need help getting started using PCPs or otherwise please feel free to get in touch through our website or use the user support channel. You could also tag one of us @rebeccatregenna or @kurund and we will be happy to support you.