How sponsorship works
Beneficiary Sponsorship lets supporters sponsor a person or a group your organisation works with. Because the people involved are often children or adults in vulnerable circumstances, the module is built around three safeguards: sponsors only ever see a limited profile, nothing is offered without recorded consent, and every profile is reviewed before it’s approved.
The main ideas
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sponsorship programme | A programme of type Beneficiary sponsorship. It’s an ordinary programme in Programmes, with sponsorship settings managed here |
| Configuration | The programme’s rules: who is sponsored, where the money goes, how amounts are set, how many sponsors each can have, communication and profile fields |
| Sponsorship opportunity | One person or group in a programme who can be sponsored |
| Profile | What sponsors see about a sponsorship opportunity: first name, age band, region, interests, a short bio and a photo, limited to the fields the programme allows |
| Consent | A record of permission to take part (Participation) and to use a photo (Image use), given by the person or someone responsible for them |
| Group | A community or project that can be sponsored, or that sponsored individuals belong to |
The life of a sponsorship opportunity
| Status | What it means | What can happen next |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Newly added. The profile can be edited | Submit for review |
| Pending review | Waiting in the approval queue. The profile is locked | Approve or Reject |
| Available | Approved | Put on hold |
| Rejected | Sent back with a reason. The profile can be edited | Submit for review again |
| On hold | Temporarily withdrawn. The profile can be edited | Release back to Available, or Submit for review if the profile changed |
| Reserved, Fully sponsored, Exited | Set aside for sponsor matching. None of the current actions set or change these statuses | None |
Safeguards built in
- Sponsors see only safe fields. A profile holds no surname, address or contact details. Free-text fields are refused if they contain an email address, a phone number, a numeric date, a web address or a social media handle.
- Consent is checked when it’s used. If participation consent is missing, expired or withdrawn, the whole sponsor-facing profile is withheld. Without image-use consent, the photo is withheld. This happens automatically when consent lapses, even though the status doesn’t change.
- Consent expires. Every consent given must have an expiry date, at most three years after it was given, so it’s renewed regularly.
- A second pair of eyes. By default, whoever approves must be someone other than the people who created, edited, wrote the profile for, or recorded consent for that sponsorship opportunity.
- Identity is kept separate. Who a sponsorship opportunity is for, the field partner and who gave consent are visible only to people with the identity permission.
- Every look is recorded. Views and changes are written to the sponsorship opportunity’s history.
Permissions
| Permission | Lets you |
|---|---|
sponsorship:read:opportunities |
See sponsorship programmes, configurations, sponsorship opportunities, groups and consent records |
sponsorship:read:identity |
See who a sponsorship opportunity is for, the field partner and who gave consent |
sponsorship:write:opportunities |
Add and edit sponsorship opportunities, groups, profiles and consent, submit for review, and put on hold or release. It doesn’t include viewing |
sponsorship:approve:opportunities |
Approve or reject sponsorship opportunities |
sponsorship:admin:config |
Change a programme’s configuration |
sponsorship:read:audit |
See a sponsorship opportunity’s history |
programmes:write:programmes |
Create a sponsorship programme |
Give each person only what their role needs. See the permission catalogue.
Your beehive needs the Beneficiary Sponsorship module. If you don’t see it in the sidebar, ask your administrator.