Getting Started with GiveBack

Every campaign needs three things:

You'll also choose your donation amount—either a fixed amount per item (e.g., $2 per product) or a percentage of the subtotal (e.g., 10% of eligible products).

For percentage campaigns, the subtotal is the price of the eligible products after any discounts—whether the discount was applied to the whole order or to an individual line item—and it excludes shipping and tax. So a $50 product bought with a 10% off code counts as $45, and a 10% campaign donates $4.50. Fixed amount per item campaigns are not affected by discounts, since they pay a set amount for each item sold.

On the Startup plan you run one campaign at a time: a campaign's dates can't overlap another's. The Growing plan lets campaigns run at the same time. When their dates overlap, the Products and Recipients steps warn you that one purchase of an eligible product could count toward more than one campaign, unless every overlapping campaign uses URL / QR Code.

You have two options for selecting products:

Everything on this step saves the moment you choose it, and a short message confirms each change. Switching to All Products with Tag replaces the products you picked one by one: the tag decides from then on, and switching back leaves the tag's products ticked rather than your earlier picks.

First, choose how customers will select their recipient:

Then add your recipients. Depending on your plan, you can have up to 3 or 50 recipients per campaign.

The star beside a recipient marks the default recipient: the one an order is credited to when the customer doesn't pick one. It appears on Option List campaigns, and on URL / QR Code campaigns whose secondary method is Option List.

• With Option List, the default is already selected on the order confirmation page, and the order is credited to it unless the customer picks someone else.
• On a URL / QR Code campaign with Option List as its secondary method, any eligible purchase made without a shopping link or shopping QR code goes to the default without asking the customer. The Recipients step warns you when it's set up that way.
• The first recipient you add becomes the default. Click another recipient's star to move it, or the filled star to have no default; each click saves right away. Archiving the default recipient leaves the campaign with no default.

The Power of Multiple Recipients

Adding multiple recipients creates friendly competition and increases engagement. Each recipient becomes motivated to share your store with their community, expanding your reach while raising more funds.

When customers have multiple recipients to choose from, they see a selection interface after checkout.

Order tagging helps you find, filter, and report on fundraised orders directly inside Shopify. When tagging is enabled for a campaign, GiveBack adds a namespaced Shopify order tag after an eligible order is matched to a recipient through the option list, fundraising code, or URL / QR code method.

When your campaign asks for the seller’s name, buyers used to type it in themselves. That meant one seller could show up as “Joe Blow”, “joe blow” and “Joe Bloe” — three separate rows on the leaderboard, each with part of Joe’s sales. The seller roster fixes this. Each recipient gets a list of sellers, and buyers choose a name from that list instead of typing it.

What buyers see

After a buyer chooses a recipient, the Seller Name section shows that recipient’s sellers in a dropdown. If the person they’re looking for isn’t listed, they choose Someone not on this list and type the name instead.

• If a recipient has no sellers yet, buyers see two plain name fields instead of a dropdown.
• A name a buyer types is added to that recipient’s roster right away, so the next buyer can pick it from the list.
• If a buyer later changes a name they typed, and no other order uses it, the roster changes with it — the old spelling isn’t left behind.
• If a buyer switches to a different recipient, the seller is cleared and they choose again from the new recipient’s list.

Set it up

Keep the roster tidy

Because buyers can add names, you’ll sometimes see a misspelling or a duplicate. Each seller on the roster has three actions:

Change the seller on an order

If a buyer picked the wrong person, click Edit on the order’s row on your campaign page and choose the correct seller from the Seller dropdown; Someone not on the list lets you type a name, which joins the roster. If you move an order to a different recipient, the dropdown starts over with that recipient’s roster, since each recipient has its own. Recipient admins can change an order’s seller too, from the recipient admin portal’s Orders page.

Reading the leaderboard

The leaderboard is a tab on the recipient’s public status page, shown when its Show order details and Show the seller leaderboard are both on. Each seller gets one row, including sellers who haven’t made a sale yet. Two extra lines at the bottom, shown when they have sales, make sure the totals always add up:

• Other — sales credited to sellers you’ve removed from the roster.
• Not attributed — sales where the buyer didn’t give a seller name.

Every recipient can have one or more recipient admins — a principal, a PTA coordinator, the charity's communications person. They get a recipient admin portal of their own where they see what the campaign has raised for them, keep the seller roster tidy, upload logos, pick colors, write the landing page text, download their orders and seller totals as CSV files, and switch their public status page on or off. They sign in with a link we email them; there are no passwords.

Recipient admins can't change anything about the campaign itself, the shopping link and fundraising code buyers use, the recipient's name, whether it has a landing page, which details its status page lists, or who its recipient admins are — those stay with you.

Add recipient admins

Open a recipient and choose the Admins tab. Paste one or several email addresses — commas or new lines between them — and click Send invites; you can send up to 20 at a time, and a recipient can have up to 25 recipient admins. Each person gets an email from GiveBack saying your store added them, with a button that takes them to sign in. The list shows who has signed in and who hasn't yet; Resend invite sends the email again, Remove takes someone's access away immediately.

What recipient admins see

The recipient admin portal has five pages — Overview, Orders, Sellers, Share and Settings — and opens on the overview: amount raised against the goal, orders, total sales and days left, with the latest orders (buyer names, never emails) and the top sellers. From there they can read every order and change which seller it is credited to, see the seller leaderboard and manage the roster, grab their status page link, their shopping QR code and shopping link or fundraising code (whichever the campaign uses) and ready-to-paste blurbs from the Share page, and change their settings.

Good to know

• Invite emails, the recipient admin portal and its ready-to-paste blurbs call your store by the name it has in Shopify (Settings → Store details). To change it, rename the store there; GiveBack picks up the new name within the hour.
• Sign-in links work once and expire after 24 hours; recipient admins can request a new one from the recipient admin portal's sign-in page. Opening a link asks them to confirm with one more click, which stops email scanners from using it up, and a sign-in lasts 60 days.
• Each person can be sent at most five links an hour, and an invite can't be resent within a minute of the last one — Resend invite tells you when either applies; try again later.
• The same person can be a recipient admin for several recipients, even across campaigns and stores — the recipient admin portal shows them all.
• Recipient admins are part of the Growing plan. On Startup the tab explains how to upgrade, and recipient admins already added stay listed, though you can't resend or remove them until you're back on Growing. Meanwhile your recipients disappear from their recipient admin portal, as they do when the store's subscription lapses or it leaves GiveBack — a recipient admin with nothing else to see is told the store may have removed them or its plan changed.
• Recipients you archive disappear from the recipient admin portal.

Once your campaign is live, your dashboard shows real-time stats including total donations, per-recipient breakdowns, and eligible orders. Use these insights to celebrate milestones and keep your recipients motivated.

Make changes while it runs

Edit opens the campaign on its Details tab — name, donation amount and dates — with Products and Recipients beside it, so you can go straight to the part you want to change. Each tab stands on its own: Details saves when you click Save Changes and keeps you on the tab, while products, the selection method and the default recipient save the moment you click, with a short message to confirm. If you leave a tab with changes you haven't saved, GiveBack asks first.

The other buttons beside Edit depend on where the campaign is:

• Pause stops an active campaign; orders placed while it's paused don't count toward it. Resume picks it up again. Once its end date has passed, Resume is greyed out: edit the dates to run it again.
• Export builds a spreadsheet of the campaign's totals and orders. Stay on the page: a Download button pops up when it's ready.
• Archive puts away a campaign that isn't running — pause an active one first. Orders placed while it's archived don't count toward it, and Restore brings it back paused.
• On the Startup plan, Resume and Restore are greyed out while the campaign's dates overlap another campaign's.
• A completed campaign keeps only Export.