Requires: Charitable Pro 1.8.16+
Charitable Ambassadors 3.0.0+

Peer-to-peer fundraising has its own vocabulary – the same word can mean different things in different platforms, and Charitable Ambassadors uses a specific set of terms throughout the docs, the admin, and the code. This page is the glossary: who’s who in a peer-to-peer program, how the pieces fit together, and which term to use when.

If you’re new to peer-to-peer fundraising entirely, the elevator pitch is: instead of running one big fundraiser for a cause, you let your supporters each run their own small fundraiser for the cause. The cause is the “parent.” Each supporter’s fundraiser is a “child” that rolls up to it. The supporter is the “ambassador.” When several ambassadors fundraise together under a shared banner, that’s a “team.”

The Four Main Pieces

Here are the four main terms you need to know:

• Parent Campaign
• Fundraiser
• Ambassador
• Team

Parent Campaign

A parent campaign is the underlying cause – the “what we’re raising money for.” It’s a regular Charitable campaign with a single setting flipped on: Enable Peer-to-Peer Fundraising. Once that’s on, ambassadors can sign up to fundraise for the parent.

Examples:

• “2026 Marathon for Children’s Hospital”
• “End-of-Year Hunger Relief Fund”
• “Annual Gala Sponsorship Drive”

A parent campaign has a goal, an end date, donation tiers, and everything else a regular campaign has. The difference: donations to the parent can come from two directions – directly (someone visits the parent’s page and donates) or indirectly (someone donates to an ambassador’s fundraiser, which rolls up to the parent).

Fundraiser

A fundraiser is an individual ambassador’s effort within a parent. It’s a separate WordPress campaign post that lives under the parent. Each fundraiser has its own page, its own goal, its own image, and its own donor list.

Examples:

• “Sarah’s Marathon Run for Children’s Hospital” (a fundraiser under the marathon parent)
• “The Liu Family Hunger Drive” (a fundraiser under the hunger relief parent)

Every fundraiser is tied to exactly one parent. Donations to the fundraiser count toward the fundraiser’s own goal AND roll up to the parent’s total.

The word “fundraiser” in Ambassadors always means this child-campaign post – the per-ambassador page. It does not mean the person; the person is the ambassador.

Ambassador

An ambassador is the person who creates and runs a fundraiser. In WordPress terms, it’s a regular WP user who has authored at least one published fundraiser. In friendly terms, it’s the supporter who said “I’ll go out and raise money from my network for your cause.”

Examples:

• Sarah Chen
• The Liu Family (technically one user, “Marcus Liu,” but the fundraiser uses the family name)

An ambassador can run multiple fundraisers across multiple parents over time. The Directory is your roster of every ambassador on your site.

Team

A team is a group of ambassadors fundraising together under a shared banner. Teams have their own page (a special variant of a fundraiser), their own goal, their own donor list – and team members’ individual fundraisers roll up to the team, which rolls up to the parent.

Examples:

• “The Smith Family Team” (under the marathon parent, with 8 family members each fundraising)
• “Ms. Garcia’s 3rd Grade Class” (under the school parent, with 23 students each fundraising)

So the chain can be three levels deep: parent > team > team member fundraiser. Donations to the team-member level roll up the chain.

3 Recipient Types

When an ambassador submits a fundraiser via the Submit Campaign form, the first step asks: who is this fundraiser for? The choices match the three structural roles a fundraiser can play:

Recipient	What the fundraiser is	Rolls up to
Individual	A solo ambassador’s fundraiser. Most common.	Parent campaign.
Team	A team that other ambassadors will join. The team itself is “the fundraiser.”	Parent campaign.
Team Member	A single ambassador joining an existing team.	The team, which rolls up to the parent.

You decide which recipient types are available on your site via Charitable » Ambassadors » General » Campaign Types Available. A pure individual-only program (e.g. memorial fundraisers) might offer just Individual. A team-based program (e.g. schools, athletic events) might offer Team + Team Member only.

Recruit / Invitee

Two related terms from the Invitations feature:

Term	Meaning
Recruit	A new ambassador who signed up through an invite link. Verbed form: “Sarah recruited Marcus.”
Invitee	Someone who received an invite link but hasn’t acted on it yet. Same person becomes a recruit only after they sign up.

The Recruit and Recruiter roles overlap with the existing Ambassador role – a recruited ambassador IS an ambassador, with extra metadata about who invited them.

Verified

A verified ambassador is one you’ve explicitly vouched for via the Directory. It’s an org-level trust signal that:

• Adds a verified badge to their public-facing pages.
• Optionally lets them recruit other ambassadors (depending on your Invitations who-can-recruit setting).
• Has no impact on the donation flow – donations work the same whether the ambassador is verified or not.

Verification is reversible at any time (Unverify in the Directory).

Active vs Inactive

State	What it means
Active ambassador	Had at least one fundraising event (submission, donation received) within the inactive-threshold window (default 90 days).
Inactive ambassador	No fundraising events within the threshold. They still appear in the All view of the Directory, just also in the Inactive view.

Inactive isn’t a soft-delete – the ambassador can resume at any time and immediately becomes active again.

How It All Fits Together

Here’s a walkthrough of a typical interaction, with the right vocabulary:

1. Your nonprofit runs a parent campaign for the year’s marathon.
2. Sarah Chen signs up as an ambassador by submitting a fundraiser with recipient type Individual. The fundraiser is published; she’s now an active ambassador.
3. Sarah’s friend Marcus Liu sees her invite link, clicks it, submits a fundraiser with recipient type Individual under the same parent. The system records him as Sarah’s recruit.
4. Your moderation team verifies Sarah after seeing she’s running a solid fundraiser. She can now recruit too.
5. A few weeks later, Sarah’s running partners want to fundraise together. Sarah creates a new fundraiser with recipient type Team called “Boston Brawlers.” Three of her running partners each submit fundraisers with recipient type Team Member under that team.
6. Donations roll up: a $50 donation to a team member counts toward the team member’s goal, the team’s goal, and the parent’s goal – all at once.

Why This Vocabulary Matters

These five terms – parent, fundraiser, ambassador, team, recipient – appear everywhere: in the admin labels, in the email templates, in the filter and action names, in the developer docs. Using them consistently keeps the docs and the product aligned.

If you write documentation for your own ambassadors (an internal wiki, a getting-started email, a kickoff webinar), match this vocabulary too. “Fundraiser” for the page, “Ambassador” for the person.

Terms We Explicitly Avoid

To prevent confusion:

• “Page” is too generic. Use “fundraiser page” when you mean the public-facing campaign page.
• “Child campaign” is a code-level term. Use “fundraiser” in customer-facing copy.
• “Captain” is a TeamRaiser-ism. Use “team owner” or “team creator.”
• “Donor” means someone who gave; not an ambassador.

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Related

• Overview Dashboard – your program-level dashboard for tracking ambassador activity.
• Directory – the roster of every ambassador, including verify / unverify.
• Submit Campaign – the form where ambassadors pick a recipient type.
• Invitations – the recruit / recruiter flow.
• Permissions – which capabilities each role gets.