Fundraising badge guidelines

You must display the badge on all your fundraising materials. This means any communication that is used to ask for money or other property for charitable purposes – whether print, digital or video content. For example:

• letters asking for donations or support
• information leaflets with a fundraising request
• envelopes that ask the recipient to donate
• event t-shirts that include information on how to donate
• collection buckets used to collect cash or card donations
• television advertisements with a call to action to donate
• social media graphics for a fundraising campaign
• website donation pages

You may also use the badge on other materials, including:

• email signatures
• letterheads
• brochures
• leaflets and promotional materials

However, we do not expect you to include the badge on your communications that are not about fundraising.

As explained in the next sections, we provide both a "digital badge", for use on your own website(s), and a "print badge", for use in other places. For both of these, we also provide colour and language options.

The "digital badge" is intended exclusively for use on your own website(s).  It confirms that your registration is valid for the current year, and makes basic checks that it is being displayed on a site that genuinely belongs to you. It will be updated automatically following your renewal - you will not need to update the badge HTML to reflect each new registration year. To provide your supporters with further confirmation, the badge will be linked to your page in the Fundraising Directory - with an added link back, so that they can easily continue on your site.

These features, which are not possible with the static images used for "print" badges, help to promote confidence in the badge and in your fundraising. They will not work in other places, so you should use the "print" version if you need to include the badge in email signatures and so on. The "print" badge does not show your registration year (because of course your paper media may be in use for longer than this).

Social-media sites will not permit the use of the HTML snippet that contains the digital badge. Instead, we have provided a feature on the digital-badge page that will allow you to post announcements of your registration to your social media, accompanied by the badge.

You may choose between English-only and bilingual Welsh-English badges. Please use the colour version if possible. However, if the colours would conflict with your design, or cause contrast or other accessibility issues, there are also black or white options.

Please make sure that the badge is clearly visible and on a contrasting background, so that people can read it easily. Do not:

• distort or warp the width to height ratio
• stretch print badge versions so that the image quality deteriorates
• use it in sizes so small that the logo and text cannot easily be read
• change the layout, font type or brand colours

Please follow these steps:

• If you have not already done so, add your site domain(s) - you can just paste the address of a page on your site into the form
• Copy our HTML snippet from the digital badge page
• Paste it in as an HTML widget or similar (depending on your page editor's terminology), and following your platform's or CMS's (content-management system's) documentation
• Position and size it using the drag-and-drop tools in your page editor

We've provided different sizes and versions as a starting point. If you're doing more precise sizing using your editor's tools, the result will be the same whichever size you choose, as our digital badge can be stretched to any reasonable size without loss of quality.

Please note that the badge may not be displayed in preview in some platforms and CMSs. This will happen if preview uses a special domain, rather than the address of your site - so the badge will fail our validation. You will need to view a published page if this happens in your case.

If you need help with your specific platform or system, please try your provider or IT support team. We have added notes for a few popular systems below.

Please feel free to contact us with feedback about the process, although we may not be able to offer detailed support on specific content-management systems or platform providers.

We ask you to tell us your domain(s) so that the badge snippet can make checks that the badge is being used on a site that is genuinely yours. Therefore you need to do this before you can copy the HTML snippet. If you need to use the badge on multiple sites, you may sometimes need to register an additional domain. If you have a test or staging site, and want to try the badge there first, it will only validate if you also add that domain.

The domain is the part of your website address that defines the site as uniquely yours, for example ourcharity.org.uk You can paste in various formats, and the "Enter your site domains" page will find the domain for you. We suggest that you just copy the address of one of your pages from your browser's address bar. For the example above, you could enter:

• ourcharity.org.uk
• www.ourcharity.org.uk/about-us
• https://www.ourcharity.org.uk/
• [email protected]

You will only need to register an additional domain if, for example, you launch a campaign site with a completely different address. By contrast, the two sites below share the domain ourcharity.org.uk, so you would only need to register it once:

• https://www.ourcharity.org.uk/
• https://fundraising.ourcharity.org.uk/

If you are unsure, you can paste the address of any of your pages into the box at the bottom of the domains page. It will tell you whether that page matches the domain(s) that you have entered, before you do any editing to add the badge. The page will also tell you if you are entering a domain that duplicates what you have already given us.

Domains can get complicated. If for example you had a site https://ourcharity.wordpress.com/ then it's fine to enter ourcharity.wordpress.com as your domain, because the first word makes it unique to you. You cannot enter just wordpress.com, because that's shared with many thousands of other WordPress users! If you would like (a lot) more detail, Mailchimp have a thorough explanation.

The HTML snippet links your badge to your page in our Fundraising Directory. Please note that the link is only intended to work successfully when it appears in one of your pages, in a site in the domain(s) that you have provided to us in this registered users' area.

The link will fail, and return a "badge validation failure" page, if you test it independently, or include it in a test site in a domain that you have not provided to us. This is expected behaviour. It provides a basic level of assurance that your badge is being used on sites that you control.

If the badge link does not validate successfully when included in your site pages, please refer to the next section.

When you have added your badge to your page, do test it by clicking on the badge. You should be taken to your page in our Fundraising Directory. If you should see a "badge validation failure" message, please check that:

1. You have notified us of the domain where your site is located, using the link on the main "Get your digital badge page". Please also add the domain for any test site if also you want the badge to validate from there.
2. You are using the HTML badge snippet exactly as we provided it. Some features of its HTML are required for successful validation. If you do want to make limited changes, please see the next section for advice.
3. You are clicking on the link on a page on your site (see point 1 above), and not elsewhere. This is necessary for the validation to succeed. For example, the validation will fail if you save the snippet to a file on your PC, and click on it there.
4. Your site systems do not prevent us from using referrers to validate your badge. These can be affected by the automated addition of attributes to links in your pages (including the badge's link to our directory), or by response headers. You may need to ask your technical specialist or support company for help with this point.

If you suspect that the referrer issue above is affecting validation, you can try checking the box for an optional modification to the badge snippet. We recommend discussing this with your technical team or support company, as it will override (but only for the badge image) a general security setting that may be in place on your server.

The modification adds an attribute to the link in the snippet, to allow our validation to take place:

referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin"

If your charity or organisation has a digital/IT team, they may wish to modify the badge HTML. For example, you are free to set the badge size directly. The standard version is intended to give the best behaviour on as many Web-editing systems or CMSs as possible, and to allow you to use drag-and-drop editing in your particular system, so please use it unless you are familiar with HTML. In the event of any issue with the badge, please make sure that you are using the standard version.

Changes to the href or image link, or that prevent the normal operation of referrers, are particularly likely to cause issues. The badge's visual appearance, including its proportions, colour options and fonts, reflects the Fundraising Regulator's brand, and we do not intend this kind of change to be attempted. Keeping the badge's appearance consistent is important in achieving its public recognition, and therefore its purpose of promoting your commitment to excellent fundraising practice.

• In edit mode, choose to "Add block".
• Select an embed block.
• Embed our HTML as a code snippet.

• Please check the "My site is on Wix" box before copying your code.
• In the Wix editor, add an "Embed HTML" widget (found under "Add code") and paste our HTML snippet into that.
• Drag the widget handles to size the badge to your requirements, as for other widgets in Wix.
• The link to your page in our directory will open in a new tab. Your users will need to close the tab rather than follow a link back to your site. This is because of the way in which Wix handles HTML snippets.

• Add a custom HTML widget in your desired location in your page.
• Paste in the badge code.
• Use the "Convert to blocks" option which you will find on the ellipsis (three dots) at top right of the widget.
• Choose to "Edit visually".
• You should now be able to size the badge by dragging the handles of your widget in the usual way.

You can share to your social media announcements that you are registered with us, from the last section of our digital-badge page, and add your own covering messages.  Social-media and similar sites do not allow the use of HTML snippets, so the fundraising badge in these posts cannot include your dates of registration, but there will still be a confirming link to your directory page.