Campaigns in Spektrix encompass all of your strands of fundraising activity and allow you to set – and report on – clear targets. They are managed in the Opportunities Interface, and the structure you use will influence other elements of fundraising in Spektrix, such as Funds and Opportunities.
In this article, we’ll cover:
What is a Campaign in Spektrix?
Campaigns are an organisational tool for managing and tracking your prospects, time, and resources. They are meant to group specific activity together against targets of your development teams and provide varying levels of granularity in reporting according to what you need.
Your Campaigns in Spektrix may or may not exactly mirror what you mean when you talk about your fundraising ‘campaigns’ out in the real world. You’ll likely have more Spektrix Campaigns than external-facing campaigns; this is because you’ll want to track progress made against specific targets.
For example, you may be running an external capital campaign. Fundraising activity to support this may include securing sponsorship from corporates, soliciting individuals, or applying to trusts and foundations or statutory bodies. In this case, Capital is the headline Campaign in Spektrix, and its Sub-Campaigns include Individuals, Funding Organisations, and Corporates. Here’s what this would look like in Spektrix:
Typically, a fundraising campaign means a period of time over which your organisation is raising money for a specific purpose, usually with a corresponding target amount. While you can create this as a Spektrix Campaign, you will likely also have additional Campaigns that break down your overall campaign fundraising into its different strands. For example, you will likely want to know, of all of the money raised for your campaign, how much came from your board members and how much came from corporate sponsors (or any other sources). Those more granular strands of fundraising are represented by a Campaign in Spektrix. Essentially, any fundraising for which you have a set target should have its own Campaign.
Whereas a Fund in Spektrix indicates where revenue goes within your organisation, a Campaign indicates how the revenue got to you. So, you might have a Fund called “Youth Arts Development Fund” and a Campaign called “Corporate Sponsors.” Donations linked to this Fund and Campaign would indicate that you received money from a corporate sponsor that’s meant to go towards your youth programming.
For more information on Funds, see this article: Donations and Funds.
The structure of your Campaigns – the way in which you build and organise them in Spektrix – is the basis of everything else in the Opportunities Interface, so it’s important to think through what you’ll need to track and report on in order to set up your Campaigns in the best way for your organisation.
Rather than just creating lots of separate Campaigns in Spektrix, you can instead nest a series of Campaigns in up to three layers, allowing you to provide a clear visual representation of how all of the component parts of your Campaign structure fit together. Here’s how that breaks down conceptually:
- Campaign: the top-level Campaign, under which everything else sits. All subsequent layers should contribute to this
- Sub-Campaigns: one or more groups of activity which influence the overall (or parent) Campaign
- Sub-sub-Campaigns: the final layer, comprising one or more groupings of activity which contribute to the parent Sub-Campaign under which they sit
Here’s a visual representation of how you might plan out this sort of Campaign structure, based on an overall financial year Campaign:
Setting up your Campaigns using this structure is a great way of visually breaking down your overall targets into chunks, and demonstrating how each level of activity feeds into your targets.
While the various layers of this structure represent the ways in which fundraising activity flows throughout the overall Campaign, each layer has its own targets. Any progress that’s made against an Opportunity in a layer (e.g. if you’ve accepted a donation from an individual with an Opportunity in the First Time Major Gifts Sub-sub Campaign) will count towards the target in that layer. In reports, each Campaign layer can therefore be reported on individually (i.e. only this year’s Corporate Sponsorship Campaign) or as a whole (by selecting all Campaigns). You can report on any or all layers to see your progress at whatever level of detail you require.
For example, in the above graphic, the total Campaign target is 600K, broken down in the Sub-Campaigns and Sub-sub-Campaigns which each have their own individual targets.
- You could report on your progress towards a single Sub-Sub Campaign such as Corporate Membership against the 50K target
- Alternatively you could report on everything that falls within the Individual Sub-Campaign and its 250K target by totaling donations linked to the three relevant Campaigns - Individual, Major Donor and First Time Major Gifts
For further guidance on how to structure your Campaigns in Spektrix, see our Campaign and Fund Structure Planning Guide.
Essentially, we suggest that the top level of your Campaign structure is based on financial years, because we have found that the vast majority of fundraising teams are asked, first and foremost, to fundraise to and report on annual targets. Of course, you may have campaigns with targets that span multiple years, such as a capital campaign, in which case you might need to have some Campaigns that exist outside of this structure.
Here’s an example of what this recommended Campaign Structure might look in Spektrix, including one Campaign (Creative Engagement) which is not based on financial years:
Do I have to use this Campaign structure?
Our fundraising-specific Standard Reports have been designed with this Campaign structure in mind, and most organisations use this structure not only because it it aligns with their organisational targets, but also because it allows for the clearest possible reporting against targets, shortfalls and projection.
We are, of course, always happy to work with you to to tailor your Campaign structure and reports to meet your needs, but please keep in mind that following this structure may make reporting simpler and cleaner.
What else should I think about?
Here are a few questions to ask when setting up your Campaign structure:
- Do you work to annual targets?
- Are you asked to project against annual targets?
- To what level of granularity does any member of the team need to be responsible?
- To what level of granularity does the Development Director/CEO need to be responsible?
- Do you (or will you in future) have a legacy and/or capital campaign, with targets that aren't annual?
- Will your Campaign structure help you track and communicate all of the above?
This isn’t a finite list, but it should at least set you off on the right path to planning out your Campaign structure. When you're ready, you'll find instructions on how to set up Campaigns, Sub-Campaigns and Sub-sub-Campaigns in our article on Setting Up Campaigns and Campaign Stages.
It’s worth highlighting the use of targets which, as noted, you can set against Campaigns, Sub-Campaigns, and Sub-sub-Campaigns.
You would typically set Campaign targets at the creation of the Campaign, and use them to represent annual revenue goals set at the department, executive, or even board level. You can report on income against these targets in the Campaign Summary Report, enabling you to track progress against your whole team’s fundraising goals. Here's an example of how that might look:
It's also possible to add targets later on if you haven't set them up at the point of Campaign creation, and to edit targets once they've been set up if you need to change them at a later date.
All Campaigns are broken down into several stages, providing a structured workflow for your Opportunities to move through as you cultivate your potential donors and funders. These stages show up on the Opportunities Dashboard.
For more information on Opportunities, see this article.
There are five standard stages in the system, based on a classic 'moves management' approach to fundraising. By default, these are Research, Involve, Cultivate, Confirm and Thank, although you can have as many or as few stages as you want, and call them whatever you want.
You should keep in mind that all of your Campaigns will use these stages, so they should work for all members of your team and all types of Campaign you might run (i.e. they should be relevant to an Individual Giving Manager, as well as a Trusts and Foundations Manager).
Each Campaign Stage can also have a default Likelihood of Success which is used to weigh the value of the open Opportunities within that stage, and can be used to forecast income. We encourage you to revisit these Likelihood of Success defaults once you’ve been using the system for a while - it may be that your Likelihood of Success at each stage is higher or lower than first anticipated!
The Campaign Summary and Campaign Detail reports both use the Likelihood of Success metric to calculate the factored amount within a given Opportunity (or set of Opportunities) that sits within a Campaign if those Opportunities don't yet contain Pledges of Donations.
For guidance around setting up and editing Campaign Stages, see our article on Setting Up Campaigns and Campaign Stages.
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Now that you have your Campaigns set up, your team can start using your Campaign structure with your Funds and Opportunities to manage and track your prospects, and report on your progress towards your fundraising goals. There are a few standard Spektrix fundraising reports to get you started on that tracking, including the Campaign Detail Report and Campaign Summary Report.
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Spektrix Support team if you’ve got questions about any of what’s been covered here, or would like to talk in more detail about anything fundraising-related.