Keep your campaign page live after the campaign ends
Taking down a campaign page throws away the links, shares and search history it earned. How to give your campaign one address that comes back every year, and what to do if a page truly has to go.
November 12, 2026Last updated November 12, 2026
December 31, 11:59 p.m. The fundraising campaign closes, the thermometer graphic stops just past its goal and somebody opens a bottle of something. By February the campaign page has been taken down to “keep the site clean.” By spring, a board member forwards the old link to a friend who wants to give, and the friend lands on a page that says it doesn’t exist.
Campaign pages get treated like event flyers: useful for a month, then recycled. On the web they work more like a savings account. The longer they stay, the more they’re worth.
A good campaign page collects things you can’t rebuild
Over a few weeks, that page gets shared in newsletters, posted by partners, linked from local news and bookmarked by donors who meant to give later. Search engines learn what it’s about. All of that is attached to its address.
Think about where that link actually went. It’s in the email your development director sent to thousands of people. It’s in a partner’s Instagram bio, a school newsletter, a podcast’s show notes and a local reporter’s story about the matching gift. None of those people will ever update their copy. Whatever happens to your page, their link keeps pointing at it for years.
That’s the part that’s easy to miss in a website cleanup. The page itself is cheap to rebuild. The trail of links leading to it took a whole campaign to lay down, and you can’t ask the internet to go back and change them.
What happens to a page that disappears
Take the page down and the address goes with it. Google says pages that return “not found” are dropped from its index. Next year’s campaign page starts with nothing.
For a person, a missing page is worse than a bit of lost search traffic. Someone clicked because a friend they trust said “give here.” What they get is a blank page with a polite apology, on the site of the organization they were about to support. Some will go looking for your donate button. Many will close the tab and tell themselves they’ll try later, which is the most expensive sentence in fundraising.
Nobody sees this happen. The donor who didn’t give never writes to say so. The only trace is a line in your site’s error report that nobody on the team reads.
Website redesigns are where this happens most. A new site launches with a fresh structure, the old campaign addresses don’t exist in it, and nobody made a list of where they should go. Overnight, every link from the last three campaigns leads to the same apology.
Give the campaign a home that comes back every year
The simplest fix is a single address for the campaign, something like yoursite.org/campaign-name, used every year. When the campaign ends, the page changes instead of disappearing: it thanks everyone, shows what the money did and keeps a way to give. When it starts again, the same page wakes up with new dates and a new goal.
Everything the page earned last year carries over, and every old link still works. Last year’s newsletter now points at this year’s campaign, which is a nice trick for an email nobody has opened since January.
Leave the year out of the address. A page called /giving-tuesday-2025 announces its own expiration date, and somebody will feel obliged to honor it. The year belongs in the headline on the page, where you can change it in a minute.
Keep the giving form itself working between campaigns, too. A campaign page can stay up for months with its donate button quietly broken, for example because someone switched off the campaign’s payment setup in January. A page that thanks people and then can’t take their money is a strange kind of hospitality. Once a quarter, someone should make a small test gift from their phone and make sure the receipt arrives.
What the page says when nothing is happening
The months between campaigns are where most pages die, because nobody knows what to put there. The answer is simpler than a redesign. A small arts nonprofit we have in mind, a composite of several we’ve met, keeps its spring campaign page live all year in a quieter version. Here is what it shows when the campaign is closed:
- A thank-you at the top, with the final total and the number of people who gave.
- One short story, with a photo, about what the money is already doing.
- A plain button to give now, for anyone who arrives late.
- A line saying when the next campaign starts, with a way to hear about it first.
That page takes an afternoon to update after each campaign. Late arrivals can still give, and the board has a page to forward that shows what happened.
Turn the ending into the best part
The week after a campaign is a good moment to tell donors what happened. A short update on the same page, with a photo, the total and one story of what it will fund, gives your partners something to share and gives late donors a reason to give anyway.
Send the thank-you email with a link back to that page. Ask the partners who promoted the campaign to share the results too. Most of them are happy to, since “look what we did together” is easier to post than another ask. Each share sends the same address back around, and the page earns a little more for next year.
If your organization also publishes an annual or impact report, link to it from the page. We wrote about making those easier to read in our piece on impact reports.
Redirect the address, and leave it there
Sometimes a page really does have to retire. Maybe the program ended, or the whole site is being rebuilt. In those cases, the old address should send people somewhere useful, usually your main donate page or the campaign’s new home. That’s called a redirect, and any web developer can set one up in minutes.
Google treats permanent redirects as a sign that the new page should show in search results instead of the old one. When a whole site changes addresses, Google’s advice is to keep redirects in place “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year”. The same page adds that, for the people clicking, you should consider keeping them indefinitely.
That last part matters most for fundraising. A donor’s bookmark doesn’t expire after a year, and neither does a forwarded email. A redirect costs nothing to keep. If you’re rebuilding your website, ask for a list of every old address and where it will go before launch day. We covered what happens when that step gets skipped in our piece on traffic after a redesign.
Before you take any campaign page down
Three questions to ask first:
- Is the address linked from emails, social posts or partner sites? Then keep it.
- Can the page become a thank-you and results page?
- If it truly has to go, does the address redirect to your main donate page?
And a few questions to ask whoever manages your website, the next time you plan a campaign:
- Can our team update the campaign page’s dates, goal and story without help?
- Where will the old campaign addresses point after the site is rebuilt?
- How will we know if someone is landing on a page that no longer exists?
The last one has a practical answer. Google Search Console, which is free, lists the addresses on your site that return errors. Someone on your team should look at it after every campaign and every redesign.
If you’re planning next year’s campaign and want a page that keeps working after it ends, book a 30-minute call and bring last year’s link with you.
