Fundraising Thermometer configuration

What a thermometer counts

Each thermometer is a goal bar that fills itself. Tracks decides what it counts:

• Money (Stripe). Dollars from one or more money sources, summed: Ghost native donations (Ghost's Tips & Donations, the paid one-time checkouts); Donation products, the Stripe product IDs behind your donation Payment Links (the amount can vary per gift); Subscriptions, valued either as new subscriptions at their current rate, new subscriptions annualized, or subscription payments actually received in the window; and a Manual amount, a fixed figure added to the total for offline gifts and pledges.
• Members (Ghost). A count of members created in the date window: free, paying, or all.
• Just manual. A number you type as the Current value and update whenever it changes. No Stripe or Ghost needed; use the suffix for units, such as " trees".

The Stripe connection

Money thermometers need a restricted, read-only Stripe key (it starts rk_). Create one in Stripe with read access to Checkout Sessions, Products and Subscriptions, and add Invoices read as well if you use the "Subscription payments received in window" source. Paste it under Stripe connection; it's encrypted at rest and never shown again after saving. Nothing else in your Stripe account is reachable with it.

Each thermometer's settings

• Label, shown above the bar. Enabled switches it on.
• Start date and End date: the window the counting covers. Leave the end blank for an ongoing campaign.
• Goal: the bar's 100%, in dollars, members, or whatever you're counting.
• Starting offset: added to the live total. Use it for money or members counted before tracking started, and for money that arrives outside Ghost and Stripe: checks, cash at an event, a grant. Update it as those come in and the bar keeps up.
• Bar colour, and a Number prefix and suffix (a $ in front, " members" behind).

The card shows the live total and when it was last refreshed, and flags a polling error if Stripe or Ghost couldn't be read.

Tip: counting new paid subscriptions. Ghost counts members from their creation date, but most members spend a while as free before upgrading, so a Members thermometer with a start date undercounts a paid drive: the people who upgraded during it but signed up earlier are left out. Instead, set no start date, so every paying member is counted, and give the Starting offset a negative value equal to the number of members who were already paying when the drive began. The bar then shows only the members who went paid since.

Embedding it

Every thermometer has its own embed snippet: a small placeholder element plus the widget script, nothing else. Paste it into an HTML card in any Ghost post or page, the donation page, or the foot of a story; the tool doesn't install anything for you. Everything about the bar (the goal, the offset, the label, the colour, the prefix and suffix) is served live from the dashboard along with the count, so a change here reaches every copy of the snippet on your site with nothing to re-paste. Two thermometers with different goals are two cards.