Hi — wondering if anyone who is really familiar with the data structures can weigh in on this question. I've come to the realization that having campaigns that were not attached to any funds or products, but were only used as a way of categorizing appeals — was a really bad idea. I'd like to rectify this by reassigning those appeals to the campaigns that were actually connected to the products the appeals were selling.
I know I will have to reopen these campaigns in order to do this reassignment, but I'm wondering if any other data is stored that is related directly to these "category" campaign objects. That is, if the _appeal campaign_ is ever stored in a way that relates it to a transaction.
My hope is that as long as transactions only reference a source or appeal or product campaign (but never appeal campaign), then I can reassign the appeal to the "correct" campaign and then see the expected changes when doing appeal reporting based on that campaign.
Ni Nick,
I have always understood the campaign field in appeal setup is for user purposes only. The application does not use the data for anything.
I found the three paragraphs in the 12.5 help system under appeal setup.
Select the Campaign to associate with the appeal. A campaign is associated with an appeal for expense purposes. There is no revenue connection between appeals and campaigns, and appeals are not filtered by campaign on any standard reports. If an appeal is intended for the marketing of products in multiple campaigns, choose one of the relevant campaigns or create a dummy campaign that exists only to satisfy this required field.
For example, general sources are those that do not represent a specific communication effort (such as a source for a general newspaper ad instead of a specific ad) or those for administrative functions (such as ticket exchanges or house orders). General sources tend to be grouped together into one or two general appeals. As these general appeals are not for the marketing of any specific products and have either no expenses or expenses that are difficult to track, a dummy general campaign can be created as a placeholder for the Campaign field on general appeals. The dummy campaign would not be assigned to any funds or products and would never have revenue attributed to it.
NOTE: Standard campaign reports pull contributions and sales based on the campaign used for the contribution or assigned to products. Associations between campaigns and appeals have no effect on which contributions and ticket sales are listed on the reports.
So I feel pretty good saying you can reassign as needed.
Matt