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Custom Domains

How to use your own domain name in the URL of all your donation pages.

Eric Knopf avatar
Written by Eric Knopf
Updated over a week ago

GivingFuel supports custom domain names for your donation page URLs so that you can replace givingfuel.com with your own custom domain name. The standard structure for all donations pages will contain givingfuel.com in the URL website address. (ex: myorganization.givingfuel.com/my-donation-page). But when using the custom domains feature, your donation pages can have the same primary domain name as your organization's website.

For example, if your organization's website address is www.mygreatcause.org, your donation pages on GivingFuel can be https://give.mygreatcause.org/give-now.

The root domain of www.mygreatcause.org still shows your own website, but your donation pages would utilize a subdomain that you choose. Common examples for subdomains people choose are donate, give, or secure. You can choose any subdomain associated with your name that you want.

This is helpful if you desire to keep the same domain name brand visible to your donors, improve SEO and better track conversions accurately on your marketing platforms of choice (Facebook, Google, etc.).

Pricing

Custom domains costs $150 per domain per year which includes the SSL coverage on the domain and advanced protection from DDoS attacks. The $150 fee is renewed annually unless canceled.

How It Works

  • There can only be 1 unique domain associated with your GivingFuel account. If you utilize our other products in our platform, you can provision a custom domain for other products for the same additional fee.

  • Adding a custom domain requires you (the admin) to make updates to the domain name DNS and it requires us (GivingFuel) to make updates to our platform as well.

  • Allow 1-2 business days for the custom domain to take effect from initial purchase. It could be faster depending on how quickly you complete your tasks.

  • Customers must have an active product with a credit card on file before they can add a custom domain to the product.

  • After the DNS settings have been adopted, your pages need to be republished in order to reflect the new domain name.

Getting Started

Select Custom Domains from the Extras tab

Click the Add Domain button

Enter a subdomain you want to use associated a domain name you own.

If you are using more than one product on the platform, be sure to specify which product you want the custom domain for. When ready, hit Save.

View confirmation of your custom domain

The following screen will confirm the custom domain name you are associating with your GivingFuel account. This page should refresh with instructions for your domain name, but if after 30 seconds it does not, refresh the page yourself.

Review Custom DNS Instructions

There will be instructions to add three records to your domain DNS to confirm you own the domain name and allow it to be used on the GivingFuel platform.

You will need to add two TXT records and one CNAME record with the company that currently hosts/manages your domain name (e.g. GoDaddy, NetworkSolutions, NameCheap, etc.).

Add Custom DNS Settings to Your Domain Name Properties

Keeping the GivingFuel settings for custom domains open, go to the registrar where you manage the domain name you want to use for your donation pages. When managing the domain name, you want to look for settings to modify the DNS of the domain. Click to manage DNS and choose to add new DNS records. ** Warning - please consult your website administrator if you are unfamiliar with managing DNS settings as you may accidentally cause your main website to go down if you delete or modify the wrong settings. ***

Below is what adding these settings look like when using Godaddy.

After you've added the records to your DNS, an automated process will validate them. This process can take up to 24 hours.

To test to see if your settings are accepted within our system, come back several hours later and look to see a "Validated" for both txt records.

Once validated our team is alerted who will make a setting change that will route all web traffic for your account through your custom domain. Please allow 1-2 business days for the team to make this setting change. The banner notification at the top of the screen will indicate our team is still completing the setup process.

Once our team has confirmed the internal settings, your custom domains setting will show a "Setup Complete" status.

After the team has made the settings change, the status banner on your custom domain settings will show "setup is complete." That is the last step of configuration, but after this is done, you you will need to republish your donation pages to reflect the new URL on your pages.

Edit/Delete Domain

To edit domains you will need to delete the domain.

The domain will be in a pending state until permanently deleted.

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