PatronManager Help

All About Campaigns

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All About Campaigns: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/982202

Campaigns are powerful, and packed with all sorts of functionality - every organization can use them.  Do you ever need to:

  • Organize and monitor your development campaigns?
  • Follow the success of a marketing campaign?
  • Track attendance to an upcoming donor event?
  • Send email marketing messages to your patrons?

Yes?  Then keep reading.  Below, we'll go into depth about what Campaigns are, what they can do, and link you to helpful articles to get you started.

What's a Campaign?

Campaigns let you group Contacts and Donations together under the banner of a single event. This makes them perfect for tracking donor events, board giving, and marketing mailings.   Better still, you can nest Campaigns in a hierarchy system to better track your development department's plans.  Here's a flowchart showing how Campaigns, Contacts, and Donations all fit together:

Campaign Hierarchy

Let's cover some of the terms and ideas in the flowchart:

  • A record called "Campaign Member" connects the Contact to each Campaign they're part of.  This lets you track special statuses, like RSVPs and Board positions.
    • Contacts can be associated with multiple Campaigns, with a different Campaign Member Status for each.
  • Donations can be connected to a Campaign, allowing you to track the success of each Campaign.  The total value of the Donations on a Campaign are automatically rolled up, which makes for easy reporting.
  • You can set Campaigns up in a Parent / Child structure, allowing you to organize your development strategy in a Campaign hierarchy.  More on that in a minute.

Below, you'll find links to articles that show you, step by step, how to create, customize, and organize Campaigns.

Create and use Campaigns

Create a Campaign

If this is your first time using Campaigns, the best way to learn about them is to create one.  Follow along with the article below - it'll show you the ropes of the Campaigns object.

Add Contacts and Donations to Campaigns

What's a Campaign good for if you're not using it to track Contacts and Donations?  As Edwin Starr would say, "absolutely nothin'."

Add custom Campaign Member Statuses

One of the best ways to use Campaigns is collaborate with colleagues on special event invitation RSVPs.  Use custom statuses to track responses like "RSVP Yes" and "RSVP "No".

Organize Campaigns

This is where the real fun begins.  Now that you've created your Campaigns, you can organize them using a Campaign hierarchy.  You'll be able to see which development and marketing pushes are the most successful, and which might need some help:

No need to keep track of these numbers in separate Excel spreadsheets!  As donations come in, you'll attach them to the Campaign that caused the gift to come in - FY17 Spring Gala, for example.  Then, the donation numbers will all roll up automatically to the parent campaigns - FY17 Galas and Donor Events, for example.  Best of all, hierarchies are totally customizable, so if you've got a plan for the year, you can track it in Campaigns.

Campaigns for Email Marketing: MailChimp Integration

The structure in the flowchart above happens to be perfect for tracking email marketing campaigns, as well.  Campaigns themselves can be used to track Open Rate and Response Rate, for example; meanwhile, Campaign Members can be used to track each Contact's interaction with the email, like Sent, Clicked, Shared, etc. That's why we use the Campaigns object to track email marketing data in PatronChimp, the MailChimp-PatronManager integration.

If you're using Emma as your email marketing platform, you'll be using Groups instead of Campaigns.  For more information about Emma, visit our Emma Welcome Center.

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