Choose a campaign type

Who can see this Owner, Admin

DonorCARE actually asks you to make two separate decisions that both get called “type” — knowing which is which saves you from picking the wrong one.

Why it works this way

The first decision is the campaign’s mode — Regular Campaign or Dharma Event. It decides which donation-collection engine runs underneath the campaign: named donation items, or tiered offerings with memorial and blessing tablets. It’s set once, when you create the campaign, and DonorCARE will not let you change it afterwards, because the two modes store completely different data.

The second decision, Campaign Type (One-Time, Recurring/Ongoing, or Emergency Appeal), only appears for Regular Campaigns. It doesn’t change anything a donor sees or does — it’s a label you can use later to filter and group your donations and reports by how the campaign runs.

The terms

Regular Campaign — the general-purpose mode. Donors give against donation items you define (a fixed price per unit, or a flexible amount with a minimum and maximum). Has a collection goal, a category, and a Beneficiary tab for describing who the campaign helps.

Dharma Event — the mode for temple ceremonies and religious observances. Donors sponsor offerings with pricing tiers instead of donation items, register names for memorial or blessing tablets, and the campaign can carry an edition year so you can compare one year’s ceremony against the next. See Run a dharma event for the full walkthrough.

Campaign Type — a reporting label (One-Time, Recurring/Ongoing, Emergency Appeal) available only on Regular Campaigns. It never appears on the public donation page.

What this means in practice

Do

• Choose Dharma Event only if you’re running a ceremony with sponsorship tiers and tablets — pick it before you create the campaign, since it can’t be switched later.
• Use Campaign Type to make your own donation reports easier to filter, not to change what donors see.

Don’t

• Don’t expect Campaign Type to change the donor’s experience — that comes from the mode and the items or offerings you add, not from this label.
• Don’t create a campaign in the wrong mode assuming you can convert it once donations start coming in.

Worked example

A temple running its annual Qingming ceremony creates a Dharma Event campaign with an edition year of 2026, so next year’s ceremony can be compared against it. A welfare NGO running a year-round food bank creates a Regular Campaign and sets its Campaign Type to Recurring/Ongoing, purely so its year-end report can separate ongoing funds from one-off appeals.

Related

• Create a campaign
• Run a dharma event
• Add sponsorship items