When creating a campaign you have the option of providing a "motivation code" and "source code". These are optional fields that allow you to track attribution to every donation page.
If you're the type of person who wants and needs this type of data, you may be asking yourself: "Can I track multiple source and motivation codes to the same page?"
Great question! Welcome to the wonderful world of "URL appending".
Don't worry, it's not terribly complicated once you understand a few of the basics.
First thing to understand (and celebrate) is that with URL appending, you can track an unlimited number of source and motivation codes.
Let's look at an example to explore how this works:
You've created a shiny new page to raise funds for a campaign called "Operation Water Wells". Your team is going to promote this donation links in several online locations -- or you could call them "sources".
- Promote on your Facebook page
- Promote via Twitter
- Promote on your organization's website
- Promote via email to your email subscribers
The "motivation" for people to donate is "Operation Water Wells".
So assigning codes to sources and motivation could look like this:
Your motivation code could be:
- operation-water-wells
The source codes could be:
- our-website
So now you may be asking yourself, "Self, do I need to create four different versions of the same donation page?"
Another brilliant question! The answer is NO.
With URL appending you can assign a motivation and/or source code to any RaiseDonors page by simply modifying the link to the donation page.
Here is an example URL from Raise Donors to promote your campaign:
https://raisedonors.com/organization/operation-water-wells
This will make sense in a moment, but the items you will be appending to the URL are:
- "sc", which stands for "source-code".
- "mc", which stands for "motivation-code".
And now... behold the magic of URL appending.
Here is that URL's would be with codes appended:
Facebook
https://raisedonors.com/organization/operation-water-wells?sc=facebook&mc=operation-water-wells
Twitter
https://raisedonors.com/organization/operation-water-wells?sc=twitter&mc=operation-water-wells
Your organization website
https://raisedonors.com/organization/operation-water-wells?sc=our-website&mc=operation-water-wells
Email to subscribers
https://raisedonors.com/organization/operation-water-wells?sc=email&mc=operation-water-wells
As you can see, you can create an unlimited number of variations to accommodate your marketing plans.
It's important to understand, using this feature will override the source and/or motivation code you have setup inside a specific page. Only use this if you need to track multiple sources and/or multiple motivation codes.
It's important to note that you cannot add ALL arguments to the URL with "&". Only the first argument is prepended with "?" and all subsequent arguments are added with "&".
If you found this article helpful, you may also find the ability to pre-populate the donation form data helpful.
Experts Tip!
There are unique situations where you may encounter unintended side affects. For example, if you include the source-code in the URL with NO value, it's possible to actually overwrite the default campaign value with an empty string. For example, if the source code on the page is set to "facebook", and your custom built URL is similar to,
https://raisedonors.com/organization/operation-water-wells?sc=&mc=operation-water-wells
You'll be supplying an empty string as the source code - and RaiseDonors will use the empty string for all data points for the source code.