How to Design a Fundraising Campaign without a Designer

Back in June, Irene Webber and I had the awesome opportunity to do a workshop at the Collaborative, an event by Classy for nonprofit professionals and social impact leaders to learn, share, and get inspired. We shared practical tips about how to design a fundraising campaign on the Classy platform when you’re not a designer.

Irene talking about the beauty of headline images!

Our goal with both the workshop and this post is to empower people to create visually stunning campaigns that tell their story and move people to support their cause. But before we dive into tips and tricks, let’s talk about design…

Design ✨

Design is more than the visual look and feel of something. It’s about problem-solving. Each of us is a problem solver in our own world, especially if you work for a non-profit. We believe that design is the ability to see problems as creative opportunities to improve the way people interact with the world.

Staring at the blank canvas of a new campaign can be daunting. You may or may not have everything you need to get started and may have a lot of questions about what will make the biggest impact. Or maybe you’ve already invested a lot of time, but it just doesn’t look the way you want it too. Either way, you probably don’t have all day to spend designing your campaign, so we want to share some practical insights to help make the process smoother. Ultimately, it’s not just about making a pretty landing page, it’s about knowing what will reach your supporters and sharing your story authentically.

We’ll share our tips and tricks for choosing the right content and telling your story effectively and at the end, we’ll provide a list of resources to get started.

Choosing the right Content

There are three main components to choosing good content: logos, colors, and images.

1. Logos

We recommend using a horizontal version of your organization’s logo for the upper left corner of the campaign. Formatting your logo this way makes it easier for donors to immediately know who you are. A vertically-formatted logo would have to squish into the height of the header on your donation page and could become hard to identify.

The second opportunity to insert a logo is for the headline on the hero section of the campaign. In Classy’s campaign builder you have the ability to type in a headline, however, to take it to the next level you can also use the Headline Image (if you don’t have an event or campaign logo, you can literally type out your headline more stylistically and save it as an image). This gives you more control over what’s in the foreground, no matter the screen size. So as the screen size shrinks from desktop to mobile devices, the headline image stays proportional, which is incredibly important to keep your campaigns accessible on all devices.

Quick tip: we do not recommend putting text straight on images — it won’t scale well to mobile and words will get obscured.

Example of a text headline

Example of a headline image

So, how do you make a headline image without a designer, you ask? We’ve got the answer! There are a couple of ways you can do it. We recommend Google Slides (or Powerpoint if you’re not a Google user). Google slides is great because 1) it’s free (with a Google account), and 2) you can create your headline using their very, very large library of fonts (and you don’t have to go through the hassle of installing them onto your computer)!

Once you’ve laid out your headline, you’ll want to make sure you change the background color to transparent. This is very important. If you don’t do this you’ll end up with a big white box under your headline. Next, you’ll export your slide as a PNG. Exporting as a PNG is also important as it’s the only image type that can have a transparent background — saving this as a JPEG would show the background as a white box.

Quick Tip: Saving a transparent PNG means you’re saving an image without a background.

Without setting the default background to transparent, you get a white box that says “community.” But if you set the background to transparent and export to PNG, you get the desired result. You can see the entire headline, “invest in your community” and you lose the walls of the container so your headline looks like it’s floating.

Comparison between headline image with transparent background and white background.

2. Colors

Color is a key indication of your brand. It captures people’s attention and it can either point them towards the goal of your page or distract them if it steals all the attention.

The most important thing to mention first about color is accessibility. As a best practice, we encourage you to use high-contrast colors for key information. This means being intentional about using light text on a dark background or dark text on a light background for bodies of text, buttons, and navigation. If you have a super bright, friendly colors for your brand, we recommend finding ways to use those colors as accents rather than your main CTA. In our resources section, we’ll share a few color tools that are great for testing contrast ratios as well as finding secondary colors to complement your design.

Accessibility is something we’re learning a lot about too and we’ve slowly been making updates to our own product (with more coming soon!)

Low Contrast vs. High Contrast

We also recommend limiting your campaign to 2–3 distinct colors. One primary action color and 1–2 accent colors. Too many colors can get distracting and muddy the information you’re trying to share.

Sample color palette from our campaign.

3. Images

This is the third topic as it relates to good content. You have a lot of options when it comes to choosing an image. So how do you know which is the best one for your scenario? When it comes to imagery in your campaign, we like to think of them in two categories:

Spotlight: These are powerful, emotional, and often have someone’s face as the subject and main focal point. They can be used as a full-width image on your page, impact blocks, or header images for peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns…pretty much wherever text isn’t required to be displayed on top.

Keep in mind that your most powerful image doesn’t necessarily need to be the hero image. You can intentionally use it elsewhere to leave an impact.

Backdrop: These images are more adaptable and present a mood rather than a specific subject. They can be landscapes or have multiple people across the entire photo. These photos lend themselves well to having text on top. They’re great for hero images and background images for donation pages.

Example of a spotlight image in a custom content block.

Here’s an image we wanted to use for our campaign. It’s full of emotion and you can really feel the woman’s happiness. This is a spotlight image. Imagine you’re a visitor, scrolling through a campaign and you see a beautiful example of the people you’re impacting. You feel this instant connection to her, to the cause, and it could be the thing that prompts you to action. Don’t feel obligated to put text on every image! For her, I added a custom content block, added the background image, and boom, instant emotional power.

Example of a spotlight image as the hero image.

You might ask why this couldn’t be the hero image. It’s beautiful and strong, which makes you want it to be the first thing people see. This is what that does to a powerful photo like this (left).

Notice how there’s instantly less of a connection to her. I can no longer see her expression, her eyes. The text is difficult to read, and this image loses its power. Not to mention, we’re no longer treating the subject with the dignity she deserves.

Now that wouldn’t do, so we found a new backdrop image. There isn’t one particular person looking at the center of the photo, and the action carries across the width of the photo, so it’s really easy to put a headline in the middle. Initially, the color of the text competed with the high contrast of the photo, but we wanted people to be able to focus on the headline first and let the image be secondary. In order to draw our donor’s attention to our headline image, we adjusted the hero image’s opacity settings so that it became a little softer. Now our headline image really pops and gives the right experience.

Telling your Story

Design is as much storytelling as it is visual layout. The biggest takeaway is that you want your supporters to feel something when they come to your page. It’s up to you to cultivate that feeling and lead them into action.

There are three components to telling a compelling story.

1. Present a problem
2. Share your solution
3. Empower action

We know things are not always this black and white, but hopefully, this is a helpful framework for you to get started.

Problem: Talk about the problem your campaign or organization is addressing and introduce us to who it’s affecting. Getting personal creates a much deeper human connection and drive for action.

Solution: This is where you get to explain who you are as an organization. Now that you’ve revealed a problem, explain what you’re doing about it and how your supporters are a key part of that.

Action: This leads us right into the final point which is empowering your supporters into action. Provide clear, actionable insights so they know how they can make a difference. Give hope to your supporters and show them how their contribution makes an impact.

Quick Tip: Be clear and concise when telling your story. Unfortunately, people won’t spend a ton of time reading your copy, so make sure to break it up into digestible chunks.

Within the Classy platform, a great way to break up your story is to spread out the copy into separate text blocks — they don’t have to be long (and you don’t necessarily need one per section like in the example below), but visually breaking out the story pieces can help people digest the content better. Like we mentioned before, this is also a GREAT way to introduce some spotlight images.

The story told in separate text blocks with a spotlight image.

Resources

Color

1. Accessible-colors.com: Quick and easy way to test the contrast of your colors. We highly recommend testing the colors you use for text blocks and buttons. You want it to “Pass AA”
2. ColorZilla: This is a Chrome or Firefox plugin. Once you install it, you can pull the hex code for any color online — so if you find a color on a website you want to use (or even if you don’t know your brand hex colors) this will help you find the number to copy and paste into the campaign designer.
3. Adobe Color: This is a great way to find color palettes that work well together. You can browse palettes that have already been created, or make your own. There are all kinds of ways to customize it and find colors that will complement one another. Like I mentioned above, this is a great way to expand your palette to include colors that are more accessible for buttons and key information.

Photos

1. Image Editing: Resizeimage.net (easy to upload and resize images), Canva.com (more advanced editing options)
2. Stock photo sites: Pexels.com, Unsplash.com, Stocksnap.io, Deathtothestockphoto.com
3. Classy Image Editor: A feature we’ve recently released that gives you more control over the appearance of your images across devices. You can learn more about the editor here or check out our full Hero Image Design Guide.

Special thanks to Stacey Uy who helped develop a lot of the content and did the first workshop with me at the 2018 Collaborative!