Charitable Ambassadors 3.0 isn’t just an update. It’s a reinvention. This is the biggest release the addon has ever seen, featuring a ground-up redesign of the admin experience alongside eight powerful new features built from years of real customer feedback.
Think of this page as your quick-start tour. Each feature comes with a deep link straight to its documentation, so you can go as deep as you need, whenever you’re ready.
Upgrading from 2.x? Don’t skip the Migration from 2.x to 3.0 guide. It’s your essential companion for a smooth transition.
Note: Ambassadors 3.0 requires Charitable Pro 1.8.16+
The Big-Picture Changes
Ambassadors 3.0 touches nearly every corner of the addon. Here’s a quick rundown of what changed and why it matters:
Admin & Navigation
| Change | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Admin moved out of Settings | Ambassadors is now its own top-level menu (Charitable » Ambassadors), faster to reach, easier to navigate. |
| Overview Dashboard | A central hub for program health at a glance, complete with KPI tiles, a hero chart, and top performer highlights. |
| Setup Wizard | Three paths to get started (Wizard, Templates, or Quick Start) so new installs are program-ready in minutes. |
Fundraiser Management
| Change | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Moderation Queue | A dedicated workflow for reviewing fundraiser submissions: approve, reject, or request changes, with a 30-second undo safety net. |
| Directory | A searchable roster of every ambassador, complete with profile pages, verify, send email, view-as, and CSV export. |
| Invitations | An opt-in personal invite link recruitment system with attribution tracking, a landing page shortcode, and a Recruitment widget on the Overview dashboard. |
Design & Display
| Change | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| 8 Layout Variants + Custom Slot | Fundraiser pages can render in eight built-in layouts; theme overrides surface as a dedicated Custom slot. |
| Visual Template Mode | Design one campaign in the Visual Builder and every fundraiser inherits it automatically. |
| Embed Widget | A small HTML snippet ambassadors can paste on any external site to display their fundraiser’s progress and a donate button. |
Notifications & Communication
| Change | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Local Notifications | Four bell-icon notifications fire on key moments: moderation queue health, first fundraiser per parent, goal reached, and total raised tier milestones. |
| Email Health Banner | Catches the case where a transactional email that should be on has been accidentally turned off. |
| Sharing Networks Chip Grid | 10 sharing networks, toggled on or off with a single click. |
Data & Utilities
| Change | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| CSV Exports Everywhere | Formula-injection-safe CSV exports available on Overview, Moderation, Directory, Invitations, and individual profile pages. |
| Per-Surface QR Codes | QR code generation is now split into per-surface toggles: fundraiser page, share popover, and My Campaigns row. |
Where Every New Feature Lives
📊 Overview Dashboard
Charitable » Ambassadors » Overview
Your program’s command center. The Overview dashboard brings everything important into one place: KPI tiles, a hero chart tracking donations over time, top fundraisers, ambassadors and parents, a Recruitment widget, Recent Donations feed, Welcome notice, and a Pending Approvals tile. If you’ve ever had to dig through reports just to answer a basic question about your program’s health, this screen was built for you.
✅ Moderation
Charitable » Ambassadors » Moderation
A dedicated workflow built around keeping your program clean and moving. Four views (Pending / Action Required / Rejected / Approved) let you triage at a glance. Inline and bulk actions keep things fast, a 30-second undo saves you from costly mistakes, and an append-only audit log per fundraiser keeps a full paper trail. Introduces the new charitable-rejected post status.
Read more about Moderation | Moderation Actions deep dive
📋 Directory
Charitable » Ambassadors » Directory
A searchable, filterable roster of every ambassador in your program. Four sub-views (All / Verified / Unverified / Inactive) make it easy to find exactly who you’re looking for. Each ambassador has a dedicated profile page with four tabs, plus actions for verify/unverify, send email, view-as, add ambassador, and bulk delete and anonymize. If you’re familiar with the donor area in Charitable, this will feel immediately at home.
Read more about Directory | Profile tabs deep dive
💌 Invitations
Charitable » Ambassadors » Invitations
An opt-in personal invite link system that turns your best ambassadors into recruiters. Each person gets their own unique link to share, and anyone who signs up through it is attributed back to them. Manage everything from one place: who can recruit, the landing page, fallback image, and more. Self-check banners flag configuration issues before they become problems, and a clean uninstall option lets you remove the feature completely if you ever need to.
Read more about Invitations | How attribution works | Storage / custom table | Landing page shortcode | Recruit card customization
🧙 Setup Wizard
Charitable » Ambassadors » General » Setup Actions » Open Setup
Three paths to get your program up and running, however fast you need to move. Follow the full guided Wizard across 10 steps, pick one of six pre-built scenario templates (Marathon, Memorial, Gala, School, Birthday, Custom), or hit Quick Start for one-click sensible defaults. Whichever path you choose, the wizard automatically creates your Submit Campaign and My Campaigns pages and optionally seeds a starter campaign so you have something to work with right away.
🎨 Templates, Visual Template Mode & 8 Layout Variants
Charitable » Ambassadors » Templates
This is the crowning feature of the 3.0 release. A redesigned Templates tab gives you full control over how fundraiser pages look and feel across your entire site. Choose your frontend template style (Legacy, Enhanced, or Visual), pick from eight layout variants in Enhanced mode, use the Visual mode template-campaign autocomplete to clone a design you’ve already built, and fine-tune your Primary Accent Color and Card Style. Every fundraiser page inherits your choices automatically, no custom CSS required.
Templates orientation | Layout Variants deep dive | Visual Template Mode | Theming
🗂️ My Campaigns
Charitable » Ambassadors » My Campaigns
Settings for the visitor-facing /my-campaigns/ page, complete with a live preview pane so you can see changes in real time. Toggle search, sort, thumbnail, progress bar, share, and QR on or off. Set a default sort order. Campaign Creator Donations Report settings also live here, giving ambassadors the ability to export their own donor data when you allow it.
📄 Fundraiser Page
Charitable » Ambassadors » Fundraiser Page
Fine-grained control over every fundraiser page on your site. Configure your layout variant, breadcrumb, share popover, comments, per-surface QR codes, donor wall position, hero image fallback, and Clean Theme Chrome, all in one place. Changes here apply globally across every ambassador fundraiser, so you set it once and it just works.
Read more about Fundraiser Page
🃏 Submit Campaign: Card-Grid Step 1
Frontend: /submit-campaign/
The submission form’s Step 1 gets a major upgrade. The old select dropdown is replaced with an intuitive card-grid recipient picker (Individual / Team / Team Member) that makes the choice obvious at a glance. Step 2’s parent picker is now AJAX-driven, complete with campaign logos and progress bars. You can also deep-link directly to a specific recipient type or parent campaign via the cap_recipient and cap_campaign URL args.
Read more about Submit Campaign
🔗 Sharing Networks
Charitable » Ambassadors » Sharing
Ten sharing networks (Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Email, Copy Link, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Reddit, Bluesky, and Threads) displayed as a clean click-to-toggle chip grid. Only the networks you enable will appear in the share popover on every fundraiser page, keeping the experience clean and relevant for your audience.
Read more about Sharing Networks
🧩 Embed Widget
Charitable » Ambassadors » Misc » Embed Widget
Off by default. Enable it to add an Embed Widget tile to fundraiser share popovers, giving each ambassador a small HTML snippet they can paste onto any external site: their personal blog, a company intranet, anywhere. The widget renders their fundraiser’s live progress bar and donate button, pulling data directly from your site. No login required for visitors.
📱 QR Codes
Charitable » Ambassadors » Misc » QR Codes (master toggle)
Charitable » Ambassadors » Fundraiser Page » Show QR Code On Fundraiser Page (per-surface)
Charitable » Ambassadors » My Campaigns » Show QR Code (per-surface)
Per-fundraiser QR codes, generated client-side and downloadable as PNG. The old single master switch has been replaced with per-surface toggles, giving you granular control over exactly where QR codes appear: on the fundraiser page, inside the share popover, or on the My Campaigns dashboard row.
🔔 Notifications
Four events now fire on the Pro bell-icon notification panel, covering the moments that matter most to anyone running a peer-to-peer program:
- Moderation queue health: stay on top of pending submissions before they pile up
- First fundraiser per parent: know the moment a campaign gets its first active fundraiser
- Goal reached: celebrate the milestone automatically
- Total raised tiers: get notified at $1K, $5K, $10K, $25K, $50K, $100K, $250K, $500K, and $1M
Per-event suppression filters let you tune the noise, and a master kill switch turns it all off when needed.
🏥 Email Health Banner
Charitable » Ambassadors » Overview (orange-bordered banner)
Ten rules run silently in the background, checking that your critical transactional emails are on when they should be. If something is misconfigured, the banner surfaces it with a one-click Enable fix so you never have to dig through settings to figure out why ambassadors aren’t getting emails.
📥 CSV Exports
Formula-injection-safe CSV exports are now available across the board: Overview (six sections), Moderation, Directory (list and profile-level), and Invitations (recent activity and top recruiters). All exports are capped at 10,000 rows by default and fully filterable, so whether you’re reporting to a board or importing into a CRM, the data is ready to go.
Tools and Diagnostics
| Surface | New in 3.0 |
|---|---|
| Charitable Tools » Site Info » Ambassadors block | Full diagnostics dump: versions, settings, custom-table state, template overrides, recent log entries. |
| Charitable Tools » Log | All ambassador events logged with source: ambassadors_*. |
Developer Surface
| Theme | Change |
|---|---|
| Filter and action surface | 300+ filters / 40+ actions across the plugin. Most named charitable_ambassadors_<feature>_*. |
| Theme overrides | Standard chain. Override any template under your-theme/charitable-pro/charitable-ambassadors/<path>.php. |
| REST | New endpoint for the Embed Widget at /wp-json/charitable-ambassadors/v1/embed-widget/<id>. CORS-controlled. |
| Custom roles | campaign_creator unchanged from 2.x. Main capability: manage_charitable_settings. |
| Custom tables | One new opt-in table for Invitations (<prefix>charitable_ambassadors_invite_tokens). |
| Custom post status | charitable-rejected for moderator-rejected fundraisers. |
What Stays the Same
If you’re worried about upgrade pain:
- All option keys are preserved. Existing customizations to settings options still apply.
- All shortcodes are preserved.
[charitable_submit_campaign],[charitable_my_campaigns], etc. - All filter/action names are preserved. A few were added, none renamed.
- All campaign URLs are preserved. Your existing fundraisers’ permalinks don’t change.
- All donations are preserved. Roll-up to parents works the same.
See Migration from 2.x to 3.0 for the full IA mapping.
Upgrade Checklist
After you upgrade, here are a few tasks we recommend completing:
- Go to Overview: Start by visiting Charitable » Ambassadors. You should land directly on the Overview screen, confirm that the KPI tiles and hero chart are rendering correctly before you do anything else.
- Skim the Setup Wizard: Open the Setup Wizard from the orange prompt on the Overview screen. If your existing settings are already in good shape, you can dismiss them without completing every step, but it’s worth a quick look to make sure nothing important has been missed.
- Pick a UI version: Head to Templates > Frontend Template Style and decide which version suits your setup. If you’ve made custom template modifications, stay on Legacy to avoid breaking anything. If you haven’t, consider promoting to Enhanced or Visual to take advantage of the new layout options.
- Verify your accent color: Navigate to Templates » Theming » Primary Accent Color and confirm it matches your brand. This single color flows across every Enhanced and Visual page, so it’s worth getting right before your ambassadors start sharing their fundraiser pages.
- Check the Email Health banner: Head back to the Overview tab and look for the orange-bordered banner near the top of the screen. If anything is flagged, fix it now – these are the transactional emails your donors and ambassadors depend on to stay informed.
- Test a submission: Navigate to
/submit-campaign/and submit a test fundraiser from the frontend. Confirm that the new card-grid Step 1 works as expected and that the form flows through to completion without any issues. - Approve the test submission: Visit Moderation, find your test submission, and click Approve. Confirm that the confirmation email goes out correctly and that the fundraiser moves to the right status.
💡 New to Ambassadors? The Overview screen’s welcome notice links back to this page, so it doubles as your orientation guide. If you’ve just taken over as program manager, start here and work through the checklist from the top.
🎯 Don’t try to learn everything at once. Ambassadors 3.0 introduces a lot of new features, but you don’t need to master them all on day one. Once you’ve completed the checklist, pick the single feature most relevant to your team’s biggest pain point and start there.
You Might Also Want to Read
Here are a few guides related to Ambassadors. You can bookmark them and read them when you need:
- Migration from 2.x to 3.0 – the IA cheat sheet.
- Setup Wizard – run the wizard to apply 3.0 defaults to any unset preferences.
- Overview Dashboard – your new home screen.
- Hooks & filters in Ambassadors – the developer reference.
Helpful Links
🤝 Get help when you need it
Connect with Customer Support →
📑 Find the guide you need
Browse the Documentation Hub →
⬇️ Download proven strategies, campaign ideas, and expert tools
Get the Fundraising Kit →
💸 Get Free Fundraising Resources
Head to the Charitable Fundraising Hub →
🤔 Got questions about Charitable?
Charitable FAQs →
Need help understanding non-profit terms and jargon?
See our Non-Profit Glossary →
