Naming Conventions

Hannah Jones · November 2017

Hello,

We are in the process of setting up LO at our organization. We want to make sure we establish strong naming conventions from the start to avoid chaos later on. Does your organization have naming conventions that have helped you keep your LO organized and clutter-free? We need naming conventions for everything from email campaigns to groups to donation forms.

Thank you for your help!

Kim Ethridge · November 2017

Hannah -

We don't really have naming conventions for donation campaigns or donation forms. Many of our campaigns span multiple years, so we just have an E-Renewal Campaign, for example, with E-Renewal Donation Form and E-Renewal Donation Form (High $).

Our email campaigns, where necessary, start with the year and month, as in 2017-11 Giving Tuesday Campaign. Here are examples for some of our email message titles based on campaign:

2017-6 EOFY Fundraising Campaigns:
- 2017-6 EOFY Appeal #1, 2017-6 EOFY Appeal #2, 2017-6 EOFY Appeal #3
- 2017-6 EOFY Major Donors #1, 2017-6 EOFY Major Donors #2, 2017-6 EOFY Major Donors #3
Action Alert Emails:
- 2017-11 MD FCA AA (MD for state, FCA for Action Alert Topic, AA for Action Alert
- 2017-9 VA Gubernatorial AA
- 2017-10 VA Gubernatorial AA
Events:
- 2017-10 VA ASMFC Meeting Invite
- 2017-11 VA ASMFC Meeting Invite Reminder
- 2017-11 DCHS Save the Date
- 2017-9 MD Tree Planting Invite #1
- 2017-10 MD Tree Planting Invite #2

Our Action Alerts follow the same convention as the Action Alert emails.

PageBuilder we use content folders. We also use the prefixes admin_ for adminstration content, reus_ for reusable content, cms_ for content used in LCMS, reg_ for registration content.

We basically thought through how we would want to be able to sort through things, for example, is it more important to be able to sort by year or by state or by campaign? We started of building examples using existing content on our old platform and poked at it until we felt we had solutions that fit all the possible scenarios we could think of.

Hope this helps!

Allison King · November 2017

Hannah Jones:

Hello,

We are in the process of setting up LO at our organization. We want to make sure we establish strong naming conventions from the start to avoid chaos later on. Does your organization have naming conventions that have helped you keep your LO organized and clutter-free? We need naming conventions for everything from email campaigns to groups to donation forms.

Thank you for your help!

Hi Hannah,

Naming conventions is one of my favorite topics (probably comes with having that Masters in Library Science).

For Luminate Online, I recommend starting with the year for single year campaigns, then the month or season (if seasonal), then the purpose of the campaign, then the purpose of the email or form.

For an EOY Campaign:

2017 EOY Email Campaign
2017 EOY Stationery
2017 EOY General Donation Form
End of Year Interest with corresponding Opt-In and Opt-Out groups (keep it generic so we can reuse it year after year)
All images related to the campaign include "2017_EOY" in the keywords

For a Welcome Series:

WS Donor Query 1
WS Donor Query Group 1
WS Donor Email Campaign
WS Donor Message 1 - Welcome
Welcome Series Interest with corresponding Opt-In and Opt-Out groups
All images related to the campaign include "welcome_series" and "ws" in the keywords

For defaults, such as a main stationery, starting with a _ or a space will float it to the top of the lists, making it easier to find.

I know many MultiCenter users require all internal names start with a three letter code to help identify which center created which campaign.

Also, be aware of public names (they have the three colored people icon next to them) vs. private names. Calendar Events, for example, only have public names.

Groups that are generated from campaigns or events take the name of the campaign or event, so a good naming convention will carry over well. As for other groups, make the names meaningful and use the description give additional information about why the group was created.

For PageBulder, use prefixes and folders. Also, when updating a page, use versions. I recommend version# - change made - initials of admin who made the change (so v4 - updated content - ak).

Ami Defesche · November 2017

Hannah Jones:

Hello,

We are in the process of setting up LO at our organization. We want to make sure we establish strong naming conventions from the start to avoid chaos later on. Does your organization have naming conventions that have helped you keep your LO organized and clutter-free? We need naming conventions for everything from email campaigns to groups to donation forms.

Thank you for your help!

As a side note, I wish you could see how truly excited Allison King got when this question came up (she just happens to sit near me). She REALLY loves naming conventions.

Philip Nawrocki · November 2017

Hello Hannah,

For e-mail we set up interests that match our campaign names. This is so that we know which interests go with which campaigns and that we do not lose constituents from our entire housefile.

An example is our monthly newsletter Heroes Update. The interest and campaign name are that and then we name the actual e-mail message in this format:

Heroes Update - <Month> <Year> Ex: Heroes Update - November 2017

We do this for our event e-mails as well. We have broken down our events into a couple interests and then have some interests inside there. An example is our Athletic-Recreational interest/campaign that has our Step Up event in it.

The naming convention for the events e-mails is this: <Event Name> <Year> - <#> Ex: Step Up 2017 - #1 (we send three e-mails for each event, so this keeps them separated and organized).

I would also create a separate Campaign for your Welcome Series. This will make viewing statistics in Luminate comparable. If you put everything in one campaign, it won't be a true judge of how your campaigns are doing. And typically a Welcome Series is one of your highest opened e-mails.

For donation forms we follow pretty closely the above.

We create a Donation Campaign so that we know every donation form in that campaign relates to that effort. An example is Annual Programs. We have a donation campaign called Direct Mail and it houses every Annual Programs related e-mail. This way we can easily see how the Annual Programs donation forms are doing without muddling it up with other forms.

We name the donation forms this way: <effort> - <Year> - <Month> optional (Vertical) Ex: Acquisition - 2017 - 01 (Mailing)

We do the same for events as well.

<Event Name> - <Year> Ex: Annual Holiday Luncheon - 2017

It is definitely helpful to get this setup ahead of time.

Thanks,

Phil

Naming Conventions

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