Pipeline Overview & Creation

Creating a Pipeline

A Pipeline is the foundation of your fundraising tracking in your Humanitru database. It defines the structure — the stages, the goal, and the timeline — that your Opportunities are organized around. You create a Pipeline once, then add individual donor Opportunities to it as your campaign gets underway.

This article walks you through creating a new Pipeline from start to finish.

Before You Start

Pipelines are available to any user with access to the Pipelines module. If you don't see Pipelines in your left-hand sidebar, contact your Customer Success Manager to confirm your permissions.

How to Create a Pipeline

Step 1: Go to the Pipelines page

From your dashboard, click Pipelines in the left-hand navigation bar.

Step 2: Click Create New Pipeline

Click the green Create New Pipeline button in the top right of the page. A modal will open with the Pipeline creation form.

Step 3: Fill out the required fields

• Enter a name in the Pipeline Name field. This is required and must be unique across your organization’s Pipelines. If a name is already taken, you'll see an error when you try to save.

• Enter the total fundraising goal for this Pipeline in the Goal Amount field. This must be a positive number. The goal is used to track progress across all the Opportunities within the Pipeline.

• Enter the target close date for the campaign in the End Date field. End dates must be in the future – you cannot retroactively create a Pipeline.

Step 4: Fill out any optional fields

• Enter a brief description of the Pipeline in the Description field. This is optional but useful if your team runs several similar initiatives and needs a way to distinguish them at a glance.

• You can optionally associate existing Campaigns with this Pipeline using the Campaigns field. This is a multi-select field — type to search and select as many Campaigns as you need. All Actions across all Opportunities in this Pipeline will have the Campaigns you select here applied to them.

Step 5: Configure your stages

Stages represent the steps in your gift conversation process — we’ve provided defaults of Identification, Qualification, Cultivation, and Solicitation. Every Pipeline requires at least one stage.

Two stages are included in every Pipeline by default and cannot be removed:

• Declined — for Opportunities where the ask was not successful

• Stewardship — for Opportunities where the ask was successful

To build out the rest of your stages:

• Click Add Stage to add a new stage and type its name

• To reorder stages, drag and drop them into the sequence that reflects your gift process

• To remove a stage you've added, click the remove icon next to it — you can only do this if the stage has no Actions associated with it

There's no fixed limit on the number of stages, but most teams find five to eight stages covers a typical gift journey well.

Step 6: Save

Click Save. If there are any validation errors — a missing required field, a duplicate name, a negative goal amount — they'll be highlighted in red with a message explaining what needs to be fixed. The form will preserve everything you've entered so you don't have to start over.

When the Pipeline saves successfully, you'll see a confirmation toast and be redirected to your new Pipeline's detail page. From here, you're ready to start adding Opportunities. See: Creating an Opportunity

What Happens After You Save

You'll land on the Overview tab of your new Pipeline. At this point the Pipeline is empty — no Opportunities have been added yet. You'll see an empty state with a prompt to add your first Opportunity.

Your Pipeline is set to Active status by default, meaning it will appear in the default Pipeline list view and be visible to all users with Pipeline access.

You can delete your Pipeline at any time, as long as it has no Opportunities in it.

Tips

• You can edit everything after saving. Pipeline name, goal, end date, description, Campaigns, and stages can all be updated later from the Pipeline detail page. The exception is stages that already have Actions associated with them — those can't be removed until the Actions are removed, or moved to different stages.

• Use the end date as your deadline, not a hard cutoff. The end date is for tracking and filtering purposes — reaching it doesn't lock or close the Pipeline automatically.

• Cloning saves time on recurring initiatives. If you run the same initiative year after year, create the Pipeline once and clone it next time rather than rebuilding from scratch. See: Cloning a Pipeline.