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What You Need To Know

Before you create a campaign, it's a good idea to review the concepts in this chapter to understand how CiviCampaign can best help you manage your work, and consider the key questions in relation to your organisation's specific needs.

Key Concepts

Your organisation will likely have its own campaign strategies and processes. CiviCampaign is a tool that you can use in conjunction with your existing methods, to streamline and automate certain processes.

Campaign Goals and Revenue

Define and document the concrete goals of the campaign, and what you hope to raise in funds (if applicable), and record it in the campaign information. This will enable you to use reports to analyze the effectiveness of a campaign at its conclusion.

Planning Your Campaign Activities

As you plan the strategy of your campaign and identify your target audience, determine what activities and information can be recorded within CiviCRM. Make sure that all recorded activities and information is connected to the campaign, so that you can track all efforts and individuals' activities related to the campaign. This allows you to to make periodic and overall evaluations of the effectiveness of your activities, strategies and outreach efforts.

Key Questions

Answer these questions in the context of your organisation or a specific campaign:

  • Who are your target audience, and how will you reach them? Remember that the audience for your campaign activities may not be the same as the audience you are trying to reach with the actual campaign itself. Understanding your target audience will help you to choose the most appropriate strategies and communication activities to achieve the goal(s) of your campaign.
  • What activities and strategies, such as events and mailings, will be associated with this campaign?
  • How will you be gathering data during the campaign (e.g. surveys, petitions, event registrations) and who will be responsible for entering the data into CiviCRM?
  • What kind of reports will be useful for monitoring progress and evaluating the campaign at its conclusion?

CiviEngage and CiviCampaign

CiviEngage is a Drupal only feature that enhances CiviCampaign with more functionality for surveys and pre-configures your installation of CiviCRM with custom data sets, profiles and enhancements to reports. See the section Civic Engagement for more details about CiviEngage.