How to add a fundraising thermometer to a Kit email

What you need

• A Kit broadcast or sequence email open in Kit’s email editor.
• A thermometer from DynaMail’s free generator. You can make it without an account, and save it to a free account before you send to your whole list.

Add it, step by step

1. 1

   Make the thermometer and copy the email snippet

   Open the free fundraising thermometer, enter your goal and what you have raised so far, pick a style and currency, and choose Make my thermometer. No account is needed yet.

   Under Where are you pasting it?, stay on Email and copy the snippet for an HTML or code block. It looks like this, with your widget id in place of the placeholder:

   Thermometer for a Kit HTML block

   Copy

   <img src="https://img.dynamail.io/widgets/YOUR-WIDGET-ID/render.png?target=20000" alt="Amount raised so far toward our goal" width="400" height="224" style="display:block;max-width:100%;height:auto;border:0;" />

   The link carries only the goal, as target. The amount raised is left out on purpose, so the image always shows the campaign’s current total.

2. 2

   Save it before a big send

   A free thermometer loads up to 5,000 times a month, and every open and page view counts. Save it before sending to a large list: sign up in the same browser where you made it, and it becomes a fundraising campaign in your account, using your account’s monthly renders (10,000 on the free plan).

   Saving keeps the exact image link, so anything you already sent or published shows the new total too. The goal is part of that link: if you change the goal later, you get a new link, and copies of the old one keep the old goal.

3. 3

   Add an HTML block

   In the email, put your cursor on an empty line where the thermometer should go and open the content block menu: click the plus (+) sign that appears on the left, or type /. Choose HTML Block.

4. 4

   Paste the snippet and save

   Click the block’s Edit button, paste the snippet into the window that opens, and click Save. The thermometer appears in the email at its own size and shrinks to fit on phones.

   Don’t use Kit’s Image block for this: it opens the media gallery, which holds images you upload, and an uploaded copy never changes.

5. 5

   Preview, send a test, then add a gift

   Click Preview in the editor’s toolbar and send a test email to yourself; Kit suggests sending it to a confirmed sending address from your account settings. Then add a test gift from the campaign page or a phone link, wait a few minutes and open the test email again. The total should have moved. Undo the test gift when you’re done.

Where it works in Kit

The HTML block is part of Kit’s email editor, so the same snippet works in a one-off broadcast and in each email of a sequence. A sequence is a good fit for a campaign that runs for weeks: a subscriber who joins late still sees the current total in the first email they get, with no edits to the sequence. Kit’s editor overview (opens in a new tab) covers the rest of the editor, including previewing as a specific subscriber.

Keep the total current

Once the thermometer is a campaign, its total is a running log of gifts. Add them whichever way suits your team; they all land in the same total, and each gift counts once even if it is sent twice.

From volunteers’ phones

On the campaign page, make a phone link for each group, such as “Door volunteers”, and share it by text or QR code. Whoever opens it gets big buttons for common amounts, an “other amount” field and an undo. There is nothing to install and no login. Anyone with the link can add gifts, so share it only with your volunteers; you can switch a link off at any time, and each gift in your log shows which link it came from. Notes typed on a phone stay in your log and are never drawn on the image.

From a Google Sheet

If your total already lives in a spreadsheet, publish it and let DynaMail read it. In Google Sheets, choose File, then Share, then Publish to web, pick the one sheet with your total, choose the CSV format and click Publish. Paste the link on the campaign page and tell DynaMail to read one cell or add up a column. Google’s publishing guide (opens in a new tab) says changes can take a few minutes to reach the published copy, and anyone with that link can read the published sheet, so publish only the sheet with the totals.

DynaMail checks the sheet every 5 minutes. If a check fails, say a row was renamed, the thermometer keeps showing the last good total and the campaign page tells you what broke. Gifts added by phone are added on top of the sheet, so don’t also type them into it.

From Zapier or your own system

Donation platforms that connect to Zapier can add each gift as it happens. DynaMail’s Zapier app, with an Add a Gift to a Fundraising Campaign action, is invite-only for now. Any tool that can send a web request can use the gifts endpoint directly, with an API key made with the Automation preset under API keys in your dashboard:

POST https://api.dynamail.io/widgets/WIDGET_ID/gifts

X-API-Key: dm_sk_your_key_here
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "giftId": "txn_8841",
  "amount": 25.50
}

Map giftId to the donation or transaction ID, so a retried request counts once. The amount can have cents, and a negative amount records a refund. The developer docs cover API keys and errors.

What people see, and when

On a website

The current total, on every page view, give or take a couple of minutes of caching.

In an email

A recent total. The image updates when the reader’s mail app fetches it: Apple Mail may fetch it when the email arrives, and Gmail keeps its own copy, so a reopened email can show an earlier total. Write around the image: “here’s how far we’ve come” works, “as of right now” doesn’t.

After you close

The final total and a thank-you, on the same link, so an appeal from October still reads right in March. Closing stops all updates; you can reopen the campaign.

The image shows whole amounts: $17,862.50 raised shows as $17,862, never rounded up. Past the goal, the thermometer stays full and the text shows the real total. Our Apple Mail Privacy Protection explainer covers why email can lag.

Before the big send

• Save the thermometer to an account first. A free thermometer loads a limited number of times a month, and a newsletter can use that up in an hour.
• Write around the image: “Here’s how far we’ve come” stays true whenever it’s opened. Don’t repeat the total in the text; the text won’t move.
• Put your donate button right under the thermometer.