Hi Everyone,
I'm noticing an issue that I never really paid attention to in the past. I'm wondering why we have to put a campaign on an event when we also will have different campaigns that are associated to the source code we use. Our finance department is having confusion as to what year things go into and I'm a little confused now myself. It's counter-intuitive (at least to me), to have to put a campaign on each individual performance event when we will have multiple campaigns (single tickets, renewals, acquisition) to acquire sales for that one event.
I think I've just typed myself into an even bigger circle of misunderstanding.
I hope someone has figured this out and the rationale.
The campaign you assign to performances and packages is the one that’s used for campaign reporting and for determining the fiscal year for GL transactions related to the sale of the performance or package.
The campaign you assign to an appeal is mostly just for potential (and rarely used) expense reporting. Here’s the explanation from the documentation:
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.
NOTE: Make sure that all active appeals are associated with campaigns that use active fiscal years. In ticket orders the fiscal year for a GL transactions is usually pulled from the campaign to which a product is assigned, but if a gift certificate is sold in a ticket order with no products present, the campaign used for the fiscal year is the campaign associated with the appeal to which the order source belongs. Using a source associated with a campaign in a past fiscal year for a new gift certificate sale can lead to the wrong fiscal year being recorded for the resulting GL transaction.
Kevin Sheehan
Senior Technical Writer & Consultant
Tessitura Network
+1 888 643 5778 x 329
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com