Track Engagement with Campaigns in NPSP
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define what campaigns are in Salesforce.
- Give an example of how a nonprofit could use campaigns.
- Identify the important sections of a campaign record.
Note
The quizzes in this module ask questions based on the content of the videos included in each unit. Be sure to watch the videos to get the information you need to answer the questions.
What Is a Campaign?
Campaigns are a planned set of communications, be it digital or analog, that move people toward a specific goal, like asking stakeholders to volunteer with your organization or donate money to a cause. When you create a campaign in Salesforce, you create a customized group from your database and send a relevant call to action to everyone in that group.
To track and manage these efforts in Salesforce you use the Campaign object to create a campaign record. A campaign record pulls in the important information related to a specific campaign—the campaign name, costs, start and end dates, meetings, mailings, calls, and other tasks and activities you need to manage the campaign.
A campaign record also links to important information about the people related to the campaign, including contact information, the total number of leads and contacts, and response rates. For a fundraising appeal, the campaign record can also include tallies on donations pledged and collected.
You may have in mind a single act of outreach to your stakeholders, but NPSP can support multiple communications related to a larger initiative. Campaign hierarchies help you connect and track smaller child campaigns (like an email) to larger parent campaigns that represent a higher level initiative (like a seasonal appeal for your annual fund).
Now that you know the terminology, it’s time to see the impact of campaigns in action. Watch this video to see concrete examples so you can start building and managing campaigns that resonate with your audience.
Get Permission to Create and Manage Campaigns
Access to campaigns and campaign records, like anything in Salesforce, is controlled by the profile permissions and sharing settings managed by your Salesforce admin. At most nonprofits, everyone can see campaigns and campaign data, but not everyone can create or edit campaign records. Your Salesforce admin needs to enable the marketing user option in order for you to manage campaigns.
To check if you have this permission, click your user icon and then select Settings. Under the My Personal Information menu section, click Advanced User Details. On this page, look for the Marketing User checkbox. If this is checked, great! If your job requires you to create campaigns and this box isn’t checked, reach out to your admin.
After campaigns are up and running and engagement is being tracked, the next step is to make a plan to gather and analyze your collected data so you can take action. In the next unit you learn how to use Salesforce reports and dashboards to do just that.