Here are some of the key concepts to know when setting up the Fund It activity.

Setting a budget

When setting up a new Fund It tool, you will first need to set a budget for your participants by choosing the cost unit you want to use. Choose from the following options:

• dollars - useful in cases where you have an exact price for each project or want to educate participants in the real-world cost of implementation.
• points - useful in cases where you want to communicate an indicative or relative cost for each project and want to be more abstract in your approach.

You must next determine a budget value to allocate to each participant. For example, if you use dollars as your cost unit, you might set a budget of $500,000.

You want to ensure that the total cost of funding all projects exceeds the budget you allocate. Otherwise, a participant can fund all projects and there are no trade-offs to be made.

You can also set a minimum spend for participants. For example, participants might need to spend at least $250,000 of their $500,000 budget. It is usually a good idea to do this, otherwise, participants can submit a contribution with $0 spent.

Adding projects

After you establish the budget parameters, you then need to add a list of projects for your participants to consider for funding. Projects can correspond to programs, activities, initiatives, capital works, or any other proposal you want to put forth.

When creating a project, you can add the following information:

• a title
• a sub-title with a catchy slogan or summary
• a description to communicate the details
• a category to help classify it
• a project sponsor
• an image or video to show the project or convey an emotion
• a price reflecting the cost of the project. The price is the value deducted from the budget when a participant selects that project for funding.

Projects appear to participants as a grid of 'project cards'. A project card contains the project's image or video thumbnail (if available), its title, a truncated description, its sponsor and the price tag. We highly recommend you include high-quality images or videos in the activity, as it adds visual interest and increases engagement.

By clicking the read more button at the bottom of the project card, participants will open an overlay providing additional project details. This view contains a bigger view of any image or video, along with the project's title and sub-title, the full description, its sponsor and its category tags.

You can change the visual display of projects by adjusting the Project View, setting it to either a grid (side by side) or a list (one on top of another).

In general, the grid view is good where the activity is placed in a wide content area (such as using the Full page template), while the list view is more appropriate for narrow content areas (such as the main area of the Right or Left Sidebar page template).

We don't recommend adding the Fund It activity to a supplementary content area such as the right column of the Righ Sidebar page template.

Project categories

You can use project tags to group or categorise your projects. This can be useful for participants to find projects of interest, especially if there are a large number of projects. It is also useful if you have different types of projects.

Examples of using project tags include categorising projects by location such as different neighbourhoods the projects fall within, projects by various typologies such as events, capital works, research, etc. or themes the projects relate to such as environment, transport, public realm, etc.

Project tags can be applied when setting up your projects, and participants can filter projects by the tag.

When the voting has finished, you can also see how many votes each category received (across all projects) in the activity's summary report, so adding tags can help you create more insightful reports.

Project sponsors

Project sponsors allow you to note if the project is owned or sponsored by a specific organisation, group, team or other entity. This feature is useful if your projects will be implemented by multiple entities and you want your participants to be aware of this information.

For example, if you're running a community grants program, individual organisations may put forth various projects up to the public for funding, with those with the most votes receiving financial support.

Like project tags, project sponsors are added when setting up your projects, and your voting will be broken down by sponsor in the report generated for the activity.

Variable Fund It

Variable Fund It introduces a new mode where items in Fund It can have a variable cost with a minimum and a, new, maximum. Users still have a budget of points or currency but now when they fund a particular project they can go beyond the minimum. This is achieved through a slider and buttons that users can use to go above a minimum after they have funded a project.

To capture extra enthusiasm for items there needs to be maximum as well as a minimum on items. The minimum cost for an item in this mode will likely stays the same as it would in a non-variable Fund It engagement as essentially that’s how much you want users to know is coming out of their budget to support the item, at the minimal level. The maximum is there to allow users to show more support. This can be different depending on the style of engagement you wish to carry out. If you want users to just be able to show a little extra enthusiasm, at a cost to their budget, it might only be 10-30% more than the minimum. If you want users to really be able to show more enthusiasm, or if the item has some implicit levels inside it (1 mural funded, 2 murals funded), then the maximum could be a multiple of the minimum cost.

With minimums and maximum specified for each item you will also see that there is an increment. That’s there to specify how large the “steps” are on the slider and the buttons the user presses. E.g. if the minimum is $500 and the maximum is $1000 then an increment of $1 means the user has to press the increment button 500 times to reach the maximum so it’s likely a larger increment would be better to enable them to choose reasonable values between the minimum and maximums.

For further information about the setting of the tool, refer to the Detailed Settings page.