Campaigns and forms are how you control the way your organization shows up to donors, and where the money goes once they give. A campaign is the bucket that categorizes revenue and routes it to an account; a form is the public page donors actually see. Every form must have a campaign attached to it.
What campaigns and forms do
Campaigns categorize all revenue from a specific form and route those payments into the payment account of your choosing. That matters if your organization runs more than one 501 entity, or if you want payments for different activities landing in different bank accounts for the same entity.
Forms are the donor-facing side: the images, wording, donation amounts, membership options, and dues periods a supporter sees. A single form can combine donations, memberships, dues, and your retail shop, or you can keep each to its own form.
Campaigns: routing revenue to the right account
Where to find it. From your dashboard, open Campaigns. You land on the campaigns list by default.
Create the campaign before you build the form. Every donation or campaign form must have a campaign linked to it, and the campaign determines how that revenue is categorized and which payment account receives it. Setting up multiple payment accounts is covered in Payment accounts.
Editing a form: basic information
Where to find it. Open Campaigns → Forms, then edit an existing form or create a new one.
Basic information sets the form title. This one is for you — it identifies the form internally and is not what donors read.
Landing customization: hero and content images
Landing customization controls how the form appears to donors on the page itself.
- Hero image — the smaller image at the top of the form. Most organizations use their logo here.
- Content image — the larger main image on the form page.
For either one, you can point at a hosted image URL or upload an image directly.
Display name, headline, and form content
The display name is the form name donors see, and it is the most prominent item at the top of the form. Below it sit the headline and then the form content.
Form content supports rich text formatting, so you can use multiple columns, line breaks, bold text, and different heading sizes.
Donation amounts, ordering, and default frequency
Form configuration is where you decide what actually appears on the form. Each section has a toggle — turn donations on to expose the donation options.
- Reorder amounts by dragging them into the sequence you want.
- Edit the value of an existing tier, or remove one entirely.
- Add amount creates a new tier.
The default donation frequency sets which frequency is pre-selected for both preset and custom amounts — one-time, monthly, annually, and so on. PineconeAI defaults to monthly to encourage donors to give recurring support.
Named giving levels and badges
Beyond plain amounts, you can create named giving levels — for example a Supporter, Champion, and Gold tier. For each level you set:
- the giving level name
- the amount
- a description, in rich text, shown to your donors
- the frequency, or no default so the donor chooses
The popular, greater impact, and default selection badges control how a tier is presented and ordered on the form, and whether it is pre-selected. Choosing a default tier is strongly recommended — it reduces the friction of giving.
Memberships, badges, and promotional pricing
The memberships section chooses which membership tiers appear on this form. Check a box to add a tier, uncheck it to hide one. Membership tiers can carry the same popular and greater impact badges as giving levels. The tiers themselves are built in Memberships.
Promotional price overrides a membership's price for this form only. The form shows the base price, the promotional price, and the auto-renewal price, so what changes is explicit.
A promotional price applies to the first term only. On an annual membership, the supporter pays the promotional price for the first year, and the membership then auto-renews at the stated renewal price in later years if auto-renewal is set.
A promotional price is not the same thing as an offer code. PineconeAI supports offer codes as well, and those are covered separately.
Dues periods on a form
Dues cover fixed time periods, where traditional memberships run relative to the date someone joins. If your fiscal year starts in January, a dues period might be the first quarter — January, February, and March. Anyone who joins at any point inside that period is responsible for that period's dues. Supporters can also prepay upcoming periods, or settle periods that have already lapsed and are past due.
Enable dues on the form, then choose the dues periods you want to offer. Setting up the dues periods themselves is covered in Dues.
Choosing the campaign and publishing
Every form requires at least one campaign. You can attach more than one, but a single campaign is recommended unless you have a campaign hierarchy you specifically need to report against.
Once the details are set, move the form to active status and click update or publish. The form's website URL is then available.
What your donors see
Open the form URL in a new browser tab to see it live: the hero image, the content image, the form name, the header details, and the content.
Donors move between whatever you enabled on that form — memberships, donations, and the retail shop, for example. Membership tiers show their full details, including any promotional and auto-renewal pricing, and named donation tiers show their badges, frequencies, and amounts alongside the option to give a custom amount.
Changes you make in your organization's settings are reflected on the live form in real time. There is no need to republish a form after editing amounts or tiers.
Selling retail through a form
If you run a gift shop, retail items can be sold online through a donation form alongside everything else — see Retail for the catalog itself. The kiosk offers a different route to the same catalog and is covered in The Kiosk.
Sharing the form: link, embed, QR code, and return URLs
PineconeAI hosts your form directly, so you can send donors straight to its URL. Embedding it in your own website is recommended.
- Embed — copy the iframe snippet PineconeAI generates for the form and place it on your site, or hand it to whoever maintains your website.
- QR code — every form has one, ready to download. Useful at an event, or anywhere you want to send people straight to the form rather than to your website.
- Return URLs — set these when donors should be returned somewhere other than the default website recorded when your organization was set up. The website and the embedded form usually share the same return URL; the kiosk form, which is built for a tablet, often needs its own.
Building more than one form
If you want a form that only takes donations, or only sells memberships, create separate forms and toggle each section on or off. Customization is per form, so a donation-only appeal and a membership drive can look and behave completely differently.
