Setting up a Campaign

Gemma Atkinson

Hi Everyone,


I am reaching out for some advice and guidance from your organization on how you set up your campaigns in RE. I am curious if for your Annual Fund Campaign if you set up a new campaign each  year and assign those gifts that you receive during that year to that campaign OR if you have the campaign roll over and just assign that campaign to the gifts that came in to that campaign?


Our current set up is just a roll over of campaign's (we have 3.... Don't even ask) but what i am finding is that its very hard to pull the reports that i would like to generate because there is no definite Campaign start and end date to do an accurate comparison of the campaigns.... Any one else have any great ways they have these set up to make reporting actually something that you can achieve?


Any help on this would be so greatly apppreciated

shani traum

We create a new campaign set each fiscal year:

2019 Annual Fund

2019 Gifts and Pledges

2019 Grants


$$ that comes in during that FY go to that campaign even if appeals are from previous year.


So cash received today in response to an 2018 appeal may look something like this:

Campaign - 2019 Annual Fund

Appeal - 2018 August Annual Fund Direct Mail


 

Gemma Atkinson

Hi Shani,


Ok great to know! This was my vision to do something very similar, it makes so much more sense to do it this way and then reporting would be a breeze.... Thank you for your response.

Karen Stuhlfeier

I don't date them and I never will. My reporting is based on gift dates and not campaigns that are created each year. We keep the same campaigns every fiscal year. It's a choice to date them - but you certainly don't need to.

Alicia Van Straten

Ours is pretty similar to Shani does it.  Campaign is our overarching buckets FY19 Scholarships, FY19Annual Fund, FY19 Student Emergency Program with goals...  Then at the start of each year, we set up the appeals that we will run to raise the funds for each campaign with goals that add up to their respective campaign goal.  Our gift processing rule is the campaign used is the current fiscal year date it comes in but the appeal stays with whatever appeal was used.  I used Bill Connors book a lot when trying to wrap my head around all of the different options/ideas.  Good luck!

JoAnn Strommen

Yes, definitely structure so you can get the reports you need. We use an umbrella campaign (Annual Sponsorship) with a fund for for each year's Kids Campaign for each YMCA branch. Would like to just have one fund but can't as gifts overlap between past, current and next year. Having them all under one campaign makes it easier to do some reports we need for the national Y summarizing all branches.