Campaign management best practices

Mark Zigadlo

Happy New Fiscal Year!.

This time of year we start a new round of campaigns and I don't have a good strategy to keep the gift processors from using old campaigns or stopping recurring gift payments and pledge payments from continuing to inherit the original campaign.

I am wondering how other organizations handle the transition from old to new campaigns.

Thank you!

-Mark

JoAnn Strommen

@Mark Zigadlo For us, if recurring gift/pledge was made during “Campaign ABC" that is where the funds were counted in reports and where any payments will be recorded, regardless of the start of a new campaign.

The way to prevent may be to mark campaign as inactive. Gifts will not be able to be committed to a fund or appeal that is inactive - I think same may hold true for campaign.

Mark Zigadlo

@JoAnn Strommen

Correct, the gift will not be committed to a fund, appeal or campaign that is inactive, which leads to a lot of “visual clutter" for our gift processors. I was hoping to find a way to keep historical data and limit the choices the gift processors have to deal with.

Faith Murray

@Mark Zigadlo
NXT (webview) does not currently allow you to amend or change a recurring gift's campaign or fund. However, you can do this in database view. Just open the recurring gift there and click “amend”.

For gifts that have not been transferred to webview and have been marked “do not post”, it is even easier, as you can change the fund/campaign without even doing an amendment. For those being managed in webview, you can no longer amend the gift amount in db view, but you can still amend the fund/campaign info. I imagine that BB will add ability to amend fund/campaign in webview eventually, and then it too will no longer be editable in db view.

Dariel Dixon

@Mark Zigadlo This is the classic “chicken and the egg” conundrum. You want to reduce the number of active campaigns listed, but need to keep the historical information from when they started. I don't know if you can satisfy both masters here. I'm a big fan of creating one campaign that doesn't change for recurring gifts.

Pledges are a slightly different animal, as there is a different requirements for formal campaign counting. You might need to keep those, but generally we are only looking at a handful of years. Recurring gifts can end at any time, as there is usually no specific amount to be raised or a certain number of payments, and no paperwork needed. It could be argued that these gifts are just annual gifts, and can be counted in the year that they were made/processed, not tied to the campaign of the original recurring gift.