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Manage Campaign Responses

Learning Objectives

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

  • Track campaign responses using campaign member records.
  • Describe how fundraising campaigns interact with opportunities.

It’s Time to Send

Now that Michael, the Communications Specialist at No More Homelessness (NMH), has campaigns set up for the upcoming advocacy training workshops at NMH and added invitees as campaign members, the team is all ready to go. 

Remember that the majority of what happens when you run a campaign takes place outside of Salesforce. Perhaps you plan on sending bulk direct mail using a mail house or, maybe like NMH, you’ll use a third-party app from the AppExchange to send email to campaign members. No matter the type of campaign, you’re ready to send your messages once your campaigns, campaign member statuses, and campaign members are all set up in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). 

Note

In this unit we’ll review how to track campaign responses through campaign, campaign member, and opportunity records directly, but if you’re using a marketing automation tool for large-scale campaigns some of this may be done for you by those systems.

Let’s follow along with Michael as he tracks responses to his advocacy training workshop invitations.

Track Campaign Responses

Responses start coming in almost immediately after Michael sends the invitation email. NMH’s stakeholders really care about this issue, and many signed up for the workshop! Michael now needs to change the campaign member status for everyone who responded. Remember that right now all campaign members have the status Sent, NMH’s default status.

To update a campaign member’s status:

  1. From the navigation bar, click Campaigns and find and select the campaign you want to edit. Michael is working with his Event: June 2021 - Advocacy Training Day campaign.
  2. Click Related.
  3. In the Campaign Member section, click View All.
  4. Find campaign members whose status you need to update and click the checkboxes in the same row to select them. You can select one or multiple campaign members. Michael selects five contacts.
  5. Click Update Status.

    The Update Status button in Campaign Members list view
  6. Select a Member Status. Michael selects RSVP Yes, one of his custom statuses from the last unit.
  7. Click Save.

    The Update Member Status window with a Member Status of RSVP Yes selected

And in a few steps, Michael updates the status for the campaign members who have already said they could attend. 

The custom Total RSVPs and the standard Responses in Campaign roll-up fields on the Campaign record

Update Campaign Status Through Opportunity Records

So far we’ve followed along with NMH as they’ve taken a hands-on approach to managing campaigns, from adding leads and contacts to tracking responses right in the campaign record. And that’s what you may need to do for advocacy, volunteer, or awareness campaigns, like the training workshops.

But there’s another way to track results that nonprofits like NMH often use, especially for fundraising campaigns that are tied to opportunity records and revenue.

In those cases, you can associate revenue to a campaign through the Primary Campaign Source field on opportunity records. Associated opportunities also provide data for roll-up fields on the campaign record to track the number of donations and the amount of revenue tied to a campaign. These tools are especially helpful to evaluate your fundraising efforts and compare fundraising appeals across channels or with different messages (we take a look at just that in the next unit, stick around).

But nonprofit fundraising is never about only money – it’s about people, too. NPSP’s Automatic Campaign Member Management allows us to keep the financial part of our campaigns in sync with the people part of our campaigns by changing campaign member statuses automatically when opportunities are created and updated.

Let’s see how this works for Michael’s colleague Sofia Rivera, an NMH Development Associate. 

She has her own campaigns tied to the No More Hostile Architecture parent campaign, testing if an advocacy-focused fundraising message resonates with donors. NMH wants to fundraise to not just cover the costs of the advocacy campaign, but also to spread the word by purchasing outdoor advertising, especially in bus stops and near parks where the city council’s proposal calls for installation of the new hostile architecture.

Let’s follow Sofia to see how an opportunity record can change a campaign member status.

First, let’s look at the current status of NMH super-donor Candace Evans. She has been included in one of Sofia’s fundraising campaigns and currently has a status of Sent.

The Campaign Members list with Candace Evans’s record in Sent status highlighted

Sofia has a check in-hand from Candace for this campaign, so she creates a new closed-won opportunity by clicking the New Donation button on Candace’s contact record and filling in the details. To associate the gift back to this campaign, Sofia finds and selects the correct campaign in the Primary Campaign Source field.

The New Donation interface with the Primary Campaign Source field highlighted

When Sofia clicks Save, Salesforce and NPSP go to work and change Candace’s campaign member status to NMH’s correct status, which their admin set up as Donated. (Your admin can configure Automatic Campaign Member Management in NPSP Settings to use whatever status works best for your organization. See the NPSP documentation linked in Resources.)

The Campaign Members list with Candace Evans’s record in Donated status highlighted

Now when Sofia adds a donation in response to the No More Hostile Architecture campaign, each contact’s campaign member status automatically updates to Donated. And that applies to every campaign: As long as the Primary Campaign Source field is populated, the donor will be added to the campaign with the correct Donated status.

Note

If you create an open opportunity associated with a campaign, NPSP will still add the potential donor to the campaign. They're assigned the default non-responded campaign member status unless your admin configured the status to something else. When the opportunity is moved to a closed-won stage, the campaign member status is updated to your organization's chosen campaign member status in Campaign Member Responded Status in NPSP Settings.

Michael and Sofia continue to work this way as their campaigns run and they seem successful. But it’s time to zoom out and see a bigger picture. In the next unit we review how to report on campaign results and data.

Resources

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