What Is a Salesforce Campaign?
In Salesforce, you can use a Campaign to represent all of these scenarios. Nonprofit and higher education organizations use Campaigns in these and many other creative ways. At a basic level, Campaigns group people together in your database so that you can ask them to take some sort of action and track the results.
Campaigns combine several sources of data in one place to make it easier to analyze the results of a call to action. They are excellent at summarizing information related to constituents (Leads or Contacts) and money (Opportunities). For example, a Campaign could summarize the number of people targeted in a fundraising appeal, how many responded, and the amount of money raised. A different Campaign could summarize the number of people invited to an event, attendance, cancellations, and a count of those who made a donation at the event
- Campaign Name: This is the name of your fundraising/email/event project. Choose a name that’s readily obvious to nonprofit staff. For example, if you send monthly emails "Nonprofit Newsletter — May 14” or a fundraising Campaign ”Save the Rainforest 2021"
- Type: This drop-down list includes the types of campaigns that you run within your marketing mix (Direct Mail, Email, Online and so on).
- Status: This drop-down list defines the statuses of a campaign. Salesforce provides a simple default drop-down list of statuses to measure a campaign’s progress, from the initial planning stages to completion. By using this field, you and others can make sure that the campaign is on track.
- Start Date: This date field tracks when a campaign begins.
- End Date: This date field tracks when a campaign ends.
- Expected Revenue: This currency field estimates how much revenue the campaign will generate.
- Budgeted Cost: This is the amount that you have budgeted for the marketing project.
- Actual Cost: This is the amount that the project actually cost.
- Expected Response: This percentage field is your best guess of the response rate of a campaign. For example, if your email campaigns typically receive a 2 percent response rate, you might use this value to benchmark the effectiveness of the campaign you’ll be tracking in Salesforce.
- Active: This check box marks whether a campaign is active. If you don’t select it, the particular campaign doesn’t appear in reports or on related lists and other campaign drop-down lists on lead, contact, and opportunity records.
- Description: This field allows you to describe the campaign so that other users who want more detailed information on the campaign can get a solid snapshot.
How do Campaigns Work?
Campaigns have special properties in Salesforce that make them a useful tool for many different scenarios. Here are four properties and why they are important.
Campaigns Group Leads and Contacts Together
You might regularly work with both Leads and Contacts as part of your constituent outreach and Campaigns make it easy to:
- Create lists of people. After you add people to your Campaign, you have a list that you can use for outreach and reporting. Campaigns also avoid duplicating the same Lead or Contact, if it is already associated with the Campaign.
- Track the status of engagement. People are related to Campaigns through a Campaign Member record. The Campaign Member links the Lead or Contact to the Campaign and has a field for tracking the Campaign Member Status. You can use the Status to track who has received a mailing, appeal, or invite, who responded to it, and so forth.
- Track the effectiveness of your outreach or fundraising efforts. A person who starts out as a Lead can be converted to a Contact and a related Opportunity. Salesforce Campaign functionality summarizes the number of converted Leads and Closed Opportunities.
- Engage with donors and volunteers. Many organizations use a sign up form to find new volunteers, clients or donors. An easy way to do this is with a Web-to-Lead form that is connected to a Campaign. Salesforce campaign functionality tracks these new people and shows which outreach tactic connected them to you.
Campaigns Track Opportunities Too
Campaigns are excellent at summarizing information–like number of attendees or amount of money raised—because they show the relationship between people and contributions. In the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), you can automatically add a donor to a Campaign when they make a donation. In addition, you can:
- Use Record Types or Opportunity Types to track different types of Opportunities, even if all of the revenue came through the same fundraising tactic (Campaign record). Some examples of revenue types could be Registration/Tickets, Donations at Event, Items bought, Auction items purchased, etc.
- Compare the effectiveness of different fundraising tactics. Imagine you had a Gala and an Auction. You can use Campaigns to compare the number and value of Opportunities and see which tactic was more effective.
Campaigns Have Hierarchy
If you have several courses within a semester, or several tactics within a fundraising goal, you may want to group campaigns and summarize the total amount of Contacts or Opportunities. Use Campaign Hierarchies to achieve this. Let’s look at an example of how a Campaign Hierarchy works.
Let’s say you're running a Spring Appeal that consists of four email blasts, a direct mailing to your major donors, and a gala banquet. Create each of those as a Campaign and relate them to the Spring Appeal 2018 Campaign using the Parent Campaign field. On the parent Campaign, you can see the aggregated amount of money you've raised as well as the money raised by the individual Campaigns. You can then compare which tactics are the most effective in your fundraising.
