Starting with CiviCRM 2.2, your organization can take advantage of an online fundraising strategy that was previously available only to users of one of the large, proprietary (and expensive) online fundraising solutions. I've spent the last few days working with our new Personal Campaign pages feature - and I'm quite excited about the potential it has to help our users take their online fundraising to the next level.

When you enable Personal Campaign Pages ("PCP's") for any existing CiviContribute online contribution page - your donors will be invited to "become supporters" by creating their own donation "portal". Getting started with PCP's involves just a few simple steps:

• Decide what basic information you want to collect from your fundraisers - a "Supporter Profile". We recommend collecting first and last name and email address. If you don't yet have a Profile with these fields, create one.
• Your fundraisers will want access to manage and update their page - so you'll set the "Account creation required" flag for this profile (under Advanced Settings).
• Now click "Configure" from Manage Contribution Pages, and then Personal Campaign Pages to enable PCP's for that contribution page and select your "Supporter Profile". You can control whether new fundraising pages require your approval before they are "live", and specify a staff email address to be notified when PCP's are added or updated.

To see what it's like for your constituents to create a fundraising pages - go to our sample page, and click the "Create your own Personal Campaign Page" link.

Our goal in designing this feature is to make the experience of creating a PCP quick and easy - while still giving each supporter the ability to really personalize their "site" and convey a compelling message. Please take some time to explore this new feature and get us your feedback. We have a few more tweaks "in progress" for alpha 2 - and if there's simple things we can do to make it even friendlier / more useful - we'll do our best to get those in prior to the stable release.

Also check out Michal's blog for another perspective on Personal Campaign pages.