CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Ok so I think I have a partial answer to my own question -but would appreciate some feedback:

What we are trying to do is create fund raising campaigns (bad choice of word given the default campaign page is for non-tax deductible political campaigns) for various causes.

Would the corrcet approach then be to define a new contribution type for each "cause" so that whether donations come from the website or
from other sources - we always have a way to properly group them together?

If this is the case, and we wanted the contribution widget to track the overall donations (not just the ones from the online page) is there an easy way to modify the query in civicrm/CRM/Widget/widget.php to select the count and sum where the contribution type was a certain one?

This would be the most elegant solution - but I don't know if widget.php has the data for contribution type.

Thanks,

but it was not campaign support we were looking for. What we needed was that donations both online and offline be credited to certain projects - and that the widgets display the total of donatins received from both sources - I posted our solution in another thread.

The confusion arose in the terminology.  Civicrm comes with a predefined contribution type of campaign contribution.  elsewhere in the documentation - the online fundraising features are called contribution pages - but then the personal pages are called personal campaign pages - so it's all very confusing.

The conclusion I came to (and I hope it's correct) is that the built-in "Campaign contribution" contribution type is an out-of-the-box type for political fund raising.  On the other hand a "personal campaign page" is really a "personal contribution page" or "personal fund raising page" where people can help in raising funds.

Perhaps taking the word "campaign" out of that context would make things clearer.  It really should be a personal contribution page.

For a newcomer it made it seem like "Campaign Contribution" was a special contribution type that HAD to be selected in order for the online fund raising pages to work right.  I know that is not said anywhere - but the loose use of terminology made it seem that way at first.