Updating a campaign structure - how far back in time should we go?

Meghan Hickey

Hi all! We're planning to start using a new campaign structure beginning with our new fiscal year, and are debating whether or not to update the campaigns for our old gifts to be more in line with that (potentially 5 years back or more). If we made the change, it would make our year-over-year comparison reports very turnkey and minimize the manual manipulation we currently need to do to get accurate YOY stats (there have been at least a couple structure changes in the past that I'm aware of), but we are concerned about data integrity and whether we'd lose historical information about how things used to be recorded.  


Have any of you made a change like this? Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Becky Heath

Hi Meghan!  I am doing the same project now. Would you be willing to share how you plan to organize the campaigns, funds & approaches?  


Thank you. 

Meghan Hickey

I received some good recommendations from others in the RE Users Group on Facebook, so I'll share them here.


We are just updating the campaign, so what we will wind up doing is saving the current campaign to a gift attribute before updating it so it'll still be searchable within the gift record.  We'll also save a snapshot of the current gift data as an Excel file as backup. Our standard reports compare the past 5 years of data, so we're planning to update campaigns from FY15 to present. Going back all the way to the beginning of our records would be a lot more complicated as our campaign structure has changed a lot, and would yield relatively small benefit. 


It's also important to consider how your campaign update will affect any cost centers they're associated with, and work with your accounting team to make sure they're aware of the changes in advance in case they need to make adjustments on their end.