Set Up White Labeling (Domain Masking) for Your Kindful Account

Overview

This article walks through setting up domain masking. This tool is excellent when paired with Conversion Tracking with Google's Ad Grants.

Linked Articles:

- Setup Your Donation Page

- Conversion Tracking with Google's Ad Grants

Step 1: Purchase a Domain Name and choose the CNAME

If you don't already own a domain name, you can purchase one from a registrar such as Network Solutions, Squarespace, or GoDaddy. Just be sure that whatever tool you choose offers DNS management.

After registering your domain, decide which CNAME record you would like to dedicate to your Kindful giving pages. Here is an example. Instead of seaturtles.kindful.com, it would read like this:

If you already have one setup, please let us know.

Important Considerations for your CNAME

• Instead of www.yourdomain.org, we suggest using something more universally applicable to your fundraising efforts such as give.yourdomain.org, as shown above. We do not recommend using "www" as the CNAME, as it can create confusion with donors/fundraisers. Popular CNAMEs include: fundraise, support, give, impact, my, donate.

• Your CNAME / sub-domain established with Kindful will be permanent.

• If you are adding domain masking to a Kindful account that has active campaigns or individual fundraisers, existing short URLs will break after domain masking is added to your account. If you anticipate going through the domain masking process later, we recommend holding off on creating short URLs until after the process is complete. Short URLs are created outside of Kindful using a service like bit.ly.

Step 2: Create a CNAME Record

Log in to your domain registrar's site, and locate the Zone File Settings, DNS Manager or similar area of your control panel. Here you will create a CNAME record that points your domain to Kindful. You'll generally see three fields: 

• Alias/Host - This will be your domain preceded by your desired word (e.g. Donate, Give, etc.). For example: donate.yourwebdomain.org
  Note: some domain registrars will automatically populate your domain for you, so you'd just need to have "donate" instead of "donate.yourwebdomain.org".
• Type - This needs to be ‘CNAME’ (indicating that you would like to point to Kindful by using its name)
• Points To: Set this as the CNAME you decided on; e.g. fundraise, support, donate, etc. Create this pointing to yourkindfulsubdomain.s.kindful.com (ex. seaturtles.s.kindful.com)

You can verify it is correctly set up by navigating to mxtoolbox.com, inputting your domain including the newly created CNAME and clicking mxlookup. If the Canonical name (CNAME) is showing your Kindful URL, you are good to go.

Below are some examples of how to set up the CNAME on various hosting services. Each hosting service has slightly different ways to create CNAME records. Guidelines are provided here for some of the common services. When in doubt, check with the particular company you're using for additional help or instructions.

• GoDaddy.com
• ix web hosting
• EveryDNS.net
• Yahoo!SmallBusiness
• No-IP
• DNS Park
• Other hosting services

If your website is hosted behind Cloudflare or a similar service, you may need to disable proxying for the DNS entry in order for the CNAME record to publish correctly. This is safe to do and will not affect your main website since the traffic for donate.yourwebdomain.org is being routed directly to Kindful.

Step 3: Contact Kindful 

When you have done all of the steps above, you are ready for us to review what you did. You will simply need to send our support team an email letting us know you have made these changes, and we will have our engineers verify and validate these changes were done properly. Once this is done, your URL will be setup, and you will use this new, white-labeled URL from here on out for your Kindful donations.

Of Note: If you are using our developer documentation to create Custom Cart Checkouts (using the widget URL), you should use the white labeled domain instead of the core subdomain.kindful.com.   Everything else will use the same paths.