This article was first published at the Button Click Admin blog as part of the “True to the Core Series” where Salesforce superstars Andres Gluecksmann, Jane Isaac, Matt Brown, and Tal Frankfurt wrote guest posts on key features they would like to see rolled out in upcoming Salesforce releases.
Salesforce.com is great about enhancing existing features and releasing new functionalities, however, I have been wondering for a long time about the absence of the Marketing Cloud. Therefore, I was very excited when Mike asked me to write a post as part of the “True to Core” series. I chose to focus on the Campaign object and based on conversation with our clients I would like to suggest three much needed enhancements.
Campaign Hierarchy or Segmentation is the King!
Let’s assume that I want my campaign to target all the constituents who have made a donation in some year but not this year (SYBUNT), live in a specific zip code, and are interested in environmental issues. Now, let’s say that I want to send a mass email to everyone who provided their email address and snail mail instead, to everyone who didn’t. Furthermore, I would like to use priority mail for all donors who gave more than $2,000 in their entire lifetime.
Creating sophisticated campaign segmentations, like the scenario I described above, is one of the most desired features our clients are asking for. Currently, it is a big headache to create them!
The campaign hierarchy feature is a great categorization tool that enables organizations to better measure and analyze the related integrated child campaigns. However, campaigns should be much more than an opportunity to blast the entire database using multiple channels.
Add to Campaign
Adding contacts to a campaign directly from a report is a really powerful feature that can save a lot of time. However, the real world is much more complex. Our clients need to report on multiple custom and standard objects and therefore, I was very excited when salesforce.com released the Custom Report Types. Unfortunately, the “Add to Campaign” button is not available on these reports. Let’s all vote for this idea to add this to the next release!
Link Campaigns to Accounts
This is an issue that has been close to my heart since I was the director of resource development of a nonprofit organization in Israel, long before I founded Cloud for Good.
Before Fred became the executive director of the Slate Rock and Gravel Foundation he was the grant officer of the Little Rock Community Foundation. As a grant officer he was a member of multiple campaigns in our system, he attended our annual conference two years ago and received 3 newsletters. Because campaigns are not directly linked to accounts I am unable to see that someone from the Community Foundation attended the conference. The campaign membership migrated with Fred to his new account.
This is a big issue for many organizations who need to cultivate and manage relationships with other organizations (vote for this idea here) . It’s about time to add the ability to link between campaigns and organizations.
