PatronManager Help

How to Create a Campaign Hierarchy

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How to Create a Campaign Hierarchy: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/982201

At the heart of a successful fundraising or marketing season is a good plan.  Take your plans from the pages of your notebook and put them into PatronManager in the form of a Campaign Hierarchy.

What's a Campaign Hierarchy?

If you're unfamiliar with what a Campaign is (sans the "hierarchy" part), we recommend checking out our introductory, All About Campaigns article before continuing.

Simply put, a Hierarchy allows you to set Campaigns up in a Parent / Child structure.  As an example, let's imagine we're making a plan for our FY17 Development efforts.

We plan to have two Appeals for our donors and ticket buyers: a Fall Appeal, and a Giving Tuesday appeal.  We'll also hold two special donor events: a Spring Gala and a Holiday event.  Finally, we have ten board members, and each of them either need to give or solicit $5,000.

So - we've got three different types of development efforts (Appeals, Donor Events, and Board Giving), and specific appeals, events, or drives that each fall into one of those three categories.  We'll make a Campaign to represent each of the following:

  • The entire fiscal year
  • The three development categories
  • Each specific event or drive

Once we've set up the Campaigns in a Parent / Child hierarchy, we can view our total donations at each level, like this:

And view the entire hierarchy, like this:

Follow along below as we create this hierarchy in PatronManager!

How to create the hierarchy

Now that we know what the hierarchy is, and we have an idea about how we need to structure it for our organization, let's go create our Campaign Hierarchy!

So which Campaign should I attach my donations to?

Great question!  Use the Primary Campaign Source field on the donation record to attach the donation to a Campaign in the lowest level of your Campaign hierarchy - in other words, the most specific Campaign.

In the hierarchy above, let's say someone hands us a check for $500, and we know it's because they received the targeted mailing we sent out for our FY17 Fall Appeal.  We'll enter the donation in PatronManager and fill the Primary Campaign Source field with "FY17 Fall Appeal."  We don't want to attach it to the FY17 Appeals and Drives Campaign because we can be more specific than that - and our reporting will be better for it.

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