Matt McWilliam

Hi Tony,

Glad the donation history came across cleanly.

Short answer: there is no separate campaign import, but you shouldn’t need one. The donation importer can create the campaign for you and attach every gift to it, so the thermometer starts at the right total. The one thing it can’t bring over is the goal, because that isn’t in the donation export, so that’s a single field you type in.

The catch is that Charitable labels that column “Campaign Title”, and the importer doesn’t recognize that name on its own, so it was most likely left unmapped on your first run. A quick way to check: if 4K Camera Fund isn’t listed under Donor Merchant > Campaigns, your gifts came in without a campaign.

To fix it:

1. Go to Donor Merchant > Donations, select the gifts you imported from Charitable, and choose Delete from Bulk actions. Your donor records stay put.
2. Run Donor Merchant > Import again with the same Charitable CSV. On the mapping screen, set “Campaign / form name” to the Campaign Title column, and check that the date is set to Date of Donation. Run the preview first (it writes nothing) and confirm the count matches your first import, then import for real.
3. Go to Donor Merchant > Campaigns, edit 4K Camera Fund, and set the goal to $2,100. You can add a description and suggested amounts there too.
4. Copy the campaign’s shortcode from the Campaigns list, for example [donor_merchant campaign=”1″], and put it on your campaign page in place of the Charitable form.

One tip before you re-import: Charitable’s export includes a “Made in Test Mode” column that the importer doesn’t read, so any test donations in the file would count toward the thermometer. It’s worth deleting those rows from the CSV first.

You could also just create the campaign by hand, but its thermometer would start at $0, because the total is calculated from the gifts linked to it.

As for the future: I’ll make the importer recognize Charitable’s “Campaign Title” and “Date of Donation” columns automatically in the next update, so the next person moving from Charitable doesn’t have to map them by hand.

Let me know how it goes.

Great question, and an easy one to answer because the plugin is deliberately quiet.

When a page loads and nobody is donating, Donor Merchant makes no external or background server requests. The donation form and the goal thermometer render entirely from your own database. There is no AJAX polling, no heartbeat, no telemetry, and the plugin never “phones home” to us or to any analytics or licensing server. You can confirm it in the source: a search for wp_remote_ only turns up Stripe, PayPal, and the optional webhook/Mailchimp calls below.

One clarification, since you asked precisely: on a page that actually contains the donation form, the visitor’s browser loads Stripe.js (from js.stripe.com) and/or the PayPal SDK (from paypal.com). That is required so card details are typed into the gateway’s own secure fields and never touch your server, which is what keeps you out of PCI scope. It is a browser-side script load, not a server call, and no donor or payment data leaves the browser until someone submits. On pages without a form, those scripts are not loaded at all: they are registered but only enqueued when a form is present.

Your server only calls Stripe or PayPal when:

• a visitor actually submits a donation;
• Stripe or PayPal send an incoming, signature-verified webhook, which they initiate;
• a donor clicks “manage my recurring gift” in the donor portal;
• and, only if you have turned them on, an outgoing webhook (Zapier/Make) or a Mailchimp sync fires the moment a donation completes.

Background/cron: the plugin registers a single WordPress cron event. On most days it does nothing; on the 1st of each month it emails the fundraising summary to your own admin address (if you leave that enabled). It makes no external request, just a local email, and WP-cron only runs when your site gets a visitor, so there is no persistent background process.

So: idle pages are silent, and external or payment requests happen only on a real donation plus the incoming webhooks the gateways send you. Happy to point you to the exact lines if that would help.