A walkathon comes back every spring. A gala returns every fall. A giving-day push happens every December. Most peer-to-peer campaigns aren’t one-off events, they’re the same program running on a loop, year after year.
The trouble is that “coming back” has always meant starting over. You rebuild the campaign from scratch, re-recruit last year’s fundraisers cold, and quietly lose the monthly donors who were attached to pages that no longer exist.
That never sat right with us. Ambassador Seasons lets you re-run the same campaign year after year while keeping the momentum you already built. When a season ends, your returning fundraisers and teams continue into the new season in one click. Their page carries forward, their web address stays the same, their recurring donors move with them, and last year’s page is archived read-only so its history is never lost. 🔁
Seasons is available now in Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.0. It’s opt-in and currently in beta, so you turn it on when you’re ready and we keep refining it based on how real programs actually use it.
Here’s What Ambassador Seasons Looks Like
Before we get into how any of this works, here’s the short version of what it does for both sides of the process: the returning fundraiser deciding whether to come back, and the admin deciding what happens to everyone who doesn’t.
On the left is what a returning fundraiser sees: a continue screen that already knows 18 of their monthly donors are coming with them. On the right is what you see before a season closes: a preview showing exactly how many fundraisers are continuing, how many aren’t, and how much recurring revenue is affected either way. Nothing happens on either side until someone clicks a button.
Why Keeping Last Year’s Fundraisers Changes Everything
The single biggest lever in peer-to-peer fundraising isn’t acquiring new fundraisers. It’s keeping the ones you already have. A fundraiser who ran a campaign for you last year already knows your cause, already has a network primed to give, and already raised money once. Getting them back for a second year is worth several cold recruits, it costs you almost nothing, and it’s central to any real donor engagement strategy.
But retention is exactly where most programs leak. The event ends, the campaign goes dormant, and 11 months later someone builds a brand-new campaign for next year. Last year’s fundraisers get a generic “we’re back” email, land on a blank page, and have to re-create everything from memory. Predictably, most of them don’t. Seasons removes that friction, so continuing feels like a win instead of a chore.
When You’ll Feel the Difference
Seasons is built for any peer-to-peer program that repeats on a calendar, not just a single big annual event. A few places it pays off:
🚶 Walkathons and run/walk events that come back every spring with mostly the same team captains.
🎗️ Annual galas and dinners with the same host committee fundraising on your behalf each year.
🎁 December giving-day pushes that lean on the same handful of top fundraisers every time.
🏫 School-based peer-to-peer drives where the grades change but the parent volunteers don’t.
🏢 Corporate team challenges where the same company groups compete against each other year after year.
One-Click Continue, for Fundraisers and Teams
When a new season opens, every returning fundraiser gets a personal continue invitation. Clicking it opens the confirmation screen below, and nothing publishes on their behalf until they actually click Continue.
Notice what’s already filled in. The fundraiser’s existing goal and story carry forward as defaults, and the screen tells them up front how many of their monthly donors are coming along, so there’s no guessing about what continuing actually costs them. They can override the goal or rewrite the story if they want a fresh start, or leave both alone and click Continue.
Their new fundraiser page comes back under the same link they shared last year, ready to accept donations again. Teams carry forward the same way: company teams, school grades, and chapter groups continue into the new season instead of rebuilding a roster from scratch. And if a fundraiser doesn’t act right away, that’s fine. A reminder email goes out as the deadline approaches, and they can still decline with “Not this year” if this isn’t their season to come back.
Your Monthly Donors Move With the Campaign
This is the part most platforms get wrong. When a supporter sets up a recurring gift through a fundraiser’s page, that relationship is valuable and fragile. If the page disappears at season’s end, the gift fails or gets orphaned, exactly the kind of drop-off donation recovery exists to catch, and you’ve lost a donor you worked hard to win. Seasons treats recurring donors as a first-class part of the handoff, not an afterthought.
When a fundraiser continues, their monthly donors move to the new season’s page automatically, the way you saw in the screen above. For fundraisers who don’t come back, you decide ahead of time what happens to their recurring gifts, so nothing falls through the cracks by accident. There are 3 policies to choose from: move future gifts to the parent campaign, leave them on the archived page as-is, or pause the subscription until someone restarts it.
A Reviewed Close, Never a Silent Bulk Action
Ending a season is deliberate, not automatic. From the season’s campaign, you open a Season Close Preview that shows exactly what’s about to happen before anything does.
In the example above, 24 fundraisers are continuing and 6 aren’t, and the preview breaks their $720 a month in combined recurring gifts down by exactly what will happen to each: some move to the parent campaign, some stay on the archived page, some get paused. That’s the kind of breakdown you’d otherwise have to stitch together by hand from a general donations report. You review it, then click Apply Season Close when the numbers look right.
Up to 4 transactional emails keep everyone in the loop along the way: the continue confirmation, a reminder before the deadline, a notice to affected recurring donors, and an admin close-summary. Each one is its own toggle, so you decide who actually hears from you. If you want those emails to reliably land in an inbox instead of a spam folder, a dedicated plugin like WP Mail SMTP helps. Pages that don’t continue archive read-only rather than disappearing, so last year’s history stays intact and becomes your warm re-engagement list for next time.
Set Up Your First Season in a Few Minutes
You can have next year’s season wired to last year’s in a few clicks. Here’s exactly what that looks like, step by step.
Step 1: Turn On Seasons and Set Your Defaults
Go to Charitable » Ambassadors » Other » Seasons in wp-admin and enable the feature. While you’re there, set your Rollover Defaults (Story, Photo, Goal) and your Non-Returning Donors policy once, while you’re calm and planning, not scrambling three weeks before an event opens.
Step 2: Point Next Year’s Campaign at Last Year’s
Create next year’s campaign with the same campaign builder you already use, open its Season box, and set Predecessor Campaign to last year’s. Give it a Season Label and, if you want them, optional open and close dates.
Step 3: Open the Season
Returning fundraisers get the continue invitation you saw earlier, and reminders go out on their own as the deadline approaches. You don’t have to chase anyone manually.
Step 4: Review the Close and Apply It
When the event wraps, open the Season Close Preview, confirm the numbers match what you expect, and apply the close. Continuing pages and their monthly donors carry forward, and last year archives cleanly.
That’s the whole flow. Want every setting explained in more depth, screenshots included?
Read the Full Ambassador Seasons Setup Tutorial →
For Agencies and Developers
Hooks for the Full Season Lifecycle
Extend Seasons with actions that fire at each step, the same pattern Automation Connect 2.0 uses elsewhere in Charitable: charitable_ambassadors_season_closed, charitable_ambassadors_fundraiser_continued, charitable_ambassadors_fundraiser_declined, charitable_ambassadors_team_continued, and charitable_ambassadors_recurring_moved.
Filters, Notifications, and Template Overrides
Tune close batch size with charitable_ambassadors_season_close_chunk_size, gate notifications with charitable_ambassadors_notifications_enabled, and set the donor-facing recurring URL with charitable_recurring_donations_page_url. Override any of the 4 season emails, season_continue, season_reminder, season_donor_notice, and season_admin_summary, from your-theme/charitable/emails/.
FAQs on Ambassador Seasons
Does this require the Charitable Pro plugin? Yes. Ambassador Seasons ships in Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.0, and it needs the Charitable Pro plugin, version 1.8.16 or later, installed underneath it.
Do I have to turn Seasons on? No. It’s opt-in and currently in beta. Your existing peer-to-peer campaigns keep working exactly as they do now until you enable it.
What happens to a fundraiser who doesn’t continue? Their page archives read-only at its existing web address, and whatever you’ve set as your Non-Returning Donors policy, move to the parent campaign, leave on the archived page, or pause, decides what happens to their recurring gifts.
Do old fundraiser links break when a season closes? No. Continuing pages keep the exact same web address, and archived pages stay live at their original address too, just read-only.
Can I run more than one recurring program with Seasons? Yes. Each season chain is just a campaign pointed at a Predecessor Campaign, so a spring walkathon and a fall gala can each run their own independent season cycle side by side.
Get Started With Ambassador Seasons
Ambassador Seasons is available now in Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.0. Open Ambassadors » Other » Seasons, turn it on, and point next year’s campaign at this year’s. Your returning fundraisers will thank you for not making them start over.
Read the Ambassador Seasons Documentation →
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If you have any questions or want help setting Seasons up for your program, our support team is ready to lend a hand.
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