Salesforce.com Campaigns

Our friends on the other coast, NPower Greater DC, published an article in their recent eNewsletter that outlined all the benefits of using Salesforce campaigns. We couldn't have said it better ourselves, so we didn't. We'll let Bob Bailey from DC lay it out for you via this reprinted article:

Salesforce.com Campaigns—By NPower’s Salesforce Guru, Bob Bailey

cam·paign [kam-peyn] –noun a systematic course of aggressive
activities for some specific purpose: a sales campaign.

We nonprofit types don't like to be aggressive or to associate ourselves with the word "Sales" but humor me here. This is actually the second definition; the first definition is "military operations for a specific objective" and I suspect that will be even less popular.

A Salesforce.com campaign can describe:

• An event such as a fundraiser, an auction, a march. This can be a major event with months of planning or a simple training on Monday morning.
• An outbound direct mail or email drop—or a telethon.

Salesforce.com campaigns are an excellent device for tracking all these things and more. Generally speaking, anything you do that involves time, people, and money is a candidate for a Salesforce campaign.

Let’s take a relatively simple example—say you want to have a breakfast meeting and invite twenty or so of your best supporters. Here's how a campaign can help:

• After you define the new campaign in Salesforce you should add all the people that you want to invite. This is easy to do because you can add them from a report.
• You should also create the tasks necessary to bring off the event—rent the space, order food, send out the invitations and so forth. This is your to-do list and it has to live someplace.
• As the RSVPs come back in you can mark them as responded and show whether or not they will be coming. Now you can do reports on who is coming or not.
• A couple of days before the event you have all the information needed to nag the non-responders and confirm / remind the people who will be coming.

Besides helping to manage the run up to the event, all this campaign data can be a big help later. How much money did we raise? What response rate did we have?

When money comes in, either as a donation or sale, it is recorded in Salesforce. There are some obvious connections to the people and the organization that wrote the check. In addition, you can record a "Primary Campaign" reference. This gives us the ability to know more about where the money came from. We can report on this using standard Salesforce reports. We can compare events and learn which was more successful.

Obviously, the more data you have the more reporting and analysis you can do. The problem is that capturing data is not easy or trivial. Moreover, storing and organizing data into information is no small chore. Salesforce.com campaigns are a great way to capture, organize and analyze event data.