People are often quite unaware of the standard sales cloud objects that can for use in non profit organisations, however they can offer a new direction for your organisation.

Salesforce Campaigns and campaign members offer the opportunity for Not for Profits to track and evaluate the impact of your constituent engagement efforts. It allows Non Profits to manage events or email mailshots and newsletters through Salesforce and monitor how their effort is resulting in more engagement. 

Track Engagement with Campaigns

Campaigns are a planned set of activities or messages designed to achieve a specific goal. In Salesforce the campaign object is used to manage and track activities that ask people to take action. Non Profit organisations can use these to track an individuals attendance at an event or email subscription and engagement or even lists of assessors,. 

As with most Salesforce objects you can create new record types, create new fields and page layouts. E.g. A record type and page layout out for events and a separate record type and page layout for newsletters. This enables the team to use distinct business processes and picklist values for each.  

Campaign Hierarchy

Campaign hierarchy is a way to group campaigns together. You can create a “Parent” campaign which sits the the top of the hierarchy and underneath the parent  you can have “child” campaigns that relate to that parent.  Campaigns in the middle can be both a parent to another set of campaigns and a child to a higher level campaign. Before you start you just need to think about how your campaigns are going to relate to each other. One massive benefit of campaign hierarchies is that it allows you to aggregate data such as the amount of money raised, number of people responded and any other metrics you may want to include for all campaigns in the hierarchy! 

Campaign Members

A campaign member record allows any lead or contact record to be associated with a campaign and allows you to track their response to each campaign you have. 

The majority of information on a campaign member record is pulled through from the lead or contact but there is a exclusive field that is only associated with the campaign member- this is the campaign member status. 

You can create bespoke member statuses for your members and how they are responding to your campaign. So for an event  you may have a status such as “Attending”. It is a good idea to make sure you create your own set of “standard” statuses across all of your campaign record types, that way it will really help with reporting down the line. 

Adding Members to A Campaign

There are a number of ways in which you can add members to a campaign. You can either add members from a list view (Lead or Contact object only)  or alternatively you can add members from standard and custom reports. This method is my favorite, as you can really dig into your data using filters to only have the members you want to include.  

When you add members to a campaign you must select a status to give the members e.g. Sent. 

Alternatively if you have a lot of campaign members to update at the same time, you can use data loader. 

To learn more about Salesforce Campaigns for non profit organisations please see this fantastic Trailhead Module. 

For more blogs on how to enhance your non profits marketing using Salesforce, check out our other blogs in the series