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Create Campaigns and Campaign Hierarchies

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Explain how to organize campaigns with campaign hierarchies.
  • Create campaigns.
  • Create and view campaign hierarchies.

Prepare to Set Up Your Campaigns

Michael Aviran, the Communications Specialist at No More Homelessness (NMH), is ready to create campaigns in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). His team has a plan to promote and track the upcoming advocacy training workshops and Michael has the right permissions in NPSP to manage it all in Salesforce. He has confirmed the naming convention for campaign records, so they’re easy to find, as well as how individual campaigns relate to one another in the campaign hierarchy. 

Let’s follow along as he sets up his part of NMH’s comprehensive effort.

Campaign Hierarchies Organize Your Campaigns

In Salesforce, a campaign hierarchy groups campaigns to make them easier to manage and analyze. You can create a parent campaign as a high-level grouping and, beneath that, child campaigns where you can track more-granular campaign efforts. Of course, those child campaigns can have child campaigns of their own — just like a family tree! — allowing you to create a full hierarchy.

Campaign hierarchies allow your team to view aggregate data like the total amount of money raised, the number of responses, and other metrics for every child campaign in the hierarchy. You can use campaign hierarchies in different ways, but many nonprofits use them to group campaigns by strategy or area of focus.

How to Structure Campaign Hierarchies

NMH is using a hierarchy to organize its campaigns this calendar year. It groups all advocacy efforts under a top-level parent campaign for all of this year’s advocacy campaigns. 

The second level of campaigns represents the key issues they’ll be working to influence this year. Michael is focused on No More Hostile Architecture, which includes several different campaign tactics.

Those tactics are grouped in the third level and include the advocacy training days, a petition drive, and an awareness and fundraising campaign run by Michael’s colleagues in development. 

The fourth, and final, level contains each individual communication effort the NMH team wants to track, with a record for each workshop, each petition drive, and each fundraising appeal whether it’s through email or direct mail.

NMH’s campaign hierarchy — focusing on the No More Hostile Architecture campaign — with a strategic focus at the top, a level of campaigns beneath that for organizing initiatives, and individual campaigns at the bottom

With this hierarchy, the team is able to see results for individual efforts, tactics, issue areas, or the entire year’s advocacy agenda. That means Michael can track his training workshop events, his colleague Sofia Rivera in development can track her fundraising appeals, their managers can track whole tactics, and NMH’s executive director can easily review these efforts in aggregate. That’s exactly the kind of data NMH needs to analyze its efforts and focus on what works best.

Other ways to use campaign hierarchies include:

  • A parent campaign for a time period with lower levels for each quarter or month, then another level for individual efforts. NMH sometimes groups fundraising campaigns this way, especially for their always-on annual fund.
  • A parent campaign for a large event, like an annual conference. The second level is for supporting marketing and outreach efforts, like the event invitation or registration communications. The third level is for tracking attendance at individual sessions.

Create a campaign hierarchy structure that works best for your organization and how you want to track and report on campaigns — but we recommend keeping things simple. A campaign hierarchy can contain a maximum of five levels in Salesforce, but there’s no reason to hit that limit if you don’t need to. Plus, some third-party online donation and event registration tools might impose constraints on your hierarchy, so be sure you understand those restrictions before you create your structure.

Now that we understand how campaigns are structured in a hierarchy, let’s follow along as Michael creates a parent campaign and child campaigns. 

Create a Parent Campaign

The top two levels of parent campaigns NMH is using to organize their outreach efforts this year, 2021 Advocacy Campaigns and No More Hostile Architecture 2021, have already been created in NMH’s org. Michael needs to create a parent campaign and multiple child campaigns for the training workshops. He’ll be calling the parent Advocacy Training Days 2021 and first of the planned workshops Event: June 2021 - Advocacy Training Day.

Let’s look at Michael’s section of the NMH hierarchy with the campaign names in NMH’s naming convention. 

NMH’s campaign hierarchy, focusing on the Advocacy Training Days section

Let’s see how Michael adds his new campaigns, starting with the parent: 

  1. Log in to Salesforce and use the App Launcher (The App Launcher icon) to find and select Nonprofit Success Pack if you’re not already there.
  2. Click the dropdown arrow (The dropdown arrow icon) on the Campaigns tab and click +New Campaign.
  3. Your admin can set up record types for the Campaign object to customize records to track the most important information. At NMH, they have several record types for campaigns. Michael chooses Event, the best option for this campaign.

    Record types on the New Campaign form
  4. Enter the campaign information:
    1. Enter a Campaign Name. Remember to use a standardized name that everyone in your org will understand easily. For this parent campaign used to group key tactics, Michael enters Advocacy Training Days 2021.
    2. Click Active. This box controls which campaigns appear in lookup fields when you add Contacts and Leads. If you leave this box unchecked, the campaign is archived and you would have to find it through search.
    3. Select a Type. Your Salesforce Admin can customize these values and the values that appear for each record type. Michael selects Training.
    4. Select a Status. Michael chooses In Progress.
    5. Find and select a Parent Campaign. Michael adds No More Hostile Architecture 2021 as the parent campaign.
    6. Enter a Start Date and End Date. This is a parent campaign for the entire year, so Michael chooses January 1 for the Start Date and December 31 for the End Date.
    7. Enter a short description for the campaign. Michael enters Training for advocates working against the installation of hostile architecture.
    8. There are also fields for Campaign Member Information and Donation Information, but Michael leaves those blank on this parent campaign.

      New Campaign: Event form
  1. Click Save.

You can then check out your new campaign record.

The Advocacy Training Days 2021 campaign record

Create a Child Campaign

Now that Michael has the parent campaign set up, he needs to create a child campaign for a specific training event NMH is holding in June. Let’s follow along.

  1. From the navigation bar in NPSP, click the dropdown arrow on the Campaigns tab and click +New Campaign.
  2. In the New Campaign form, select a record type. Michael again selects Event.
  3. Enter the campaign information.
    1. Enter a Campaign Name. Michael enters the campaign name based on the NMH naming convention — Event: June 2021 - Advocacy Training Day.
    2. Click Active.
    3. Select a Type. Michael picks Training.
    4. Select a Status. Michael picks Planned.
    5. Enter a Parent Campaign. Michael finds and selects the last campaign he created, Advocacy Training Days 2021.
    6. Choose a Start Date and End Date. Michael enters the date of the event, June 19.
    7. Enter a short description for the campaign. Michael enters Training day for advocates.
    8. There are also fields for Campaign Member Information and Donation Information, but Michael leaves those blank on this campaign.
    9. Complete other custom fields as needed. NMH’s admin created an Event Details section and fields for the team to record important information like the event location and onsite contact. Michael fills in these fields, but they won’t be available in your Trailhead Playground if you're following along. Talk with your admin and check out the details in Resources if you’d like custom fields for your campaigns.
  1. Click Save.

Check out the new campaign record. 

A new campaign record for an upcoming event

View a Campaign Hierarchy

Once Michael creates the first campaign record for his advocacy training days, he checks that the campaign hierarchy is correct. 

He can get to the hierarchy by clicking on the View Campaign Hierarchy button next to the campaign name on a record.

Campaign record header, highlighting the View Campaign Hierarchy button

This is the hierarchy for the No More Hostile Architecture campaign (including a few campaigns we’ll talk about later).

The NMH Campaign Hierarchy for No More Hostile Architecture

Of course, Michael has more than one advocacy training day planned. He can create a duplicate (or a clone in Salesforce campaign-speak) of his first event and change the relevant details. Before he does that, though, he wants to make a few other customizations to the first event.

We explore those, and get down to inviting folks to the training, in the next unit.

Resources

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