Chapter 7. Campaigning with Petitions and Surveys

One of the challenges many organizations will face is how to best orchestrate multiple outreach and promotion efforts into a unified project—something that will clearly tie together these disparate pieces so that they can be understood and reported on as part of a single goal. For politically-oriented organizations, or those that are involved in lobbying and education efforts to advance the concerns of the organization to legislators, their project goals will often include outreach to constituents or the public at large, seeking support for their positions. CiviCRM's campaign tools can provide the project glue and many of the outreach features to help achieve these goals. Although you can also use campaigns in CiviCRM for fundraising, it is originally more focused on political processes.

In this chapter, we will discover how campaigns can help you in:

• Managing projects

• Defining goals

• Reporting on them in a unified way

We will also take a look...

Working with campaigns

Before we delve into the details, let's first understand what a campaign is in CiviCRM. The terminology can be a little misleading, as the word "campaign" may have a specific connotation in different contexts. For example, you might hear the word and immediately think of a political campaign, seeking to elect a person for office; or you might think of a member outreach campaign, which is seeking to increase membership by a certain percentage over a fixed period of time. Both are good examples of how campaigns can be used in CiviCRM; but we want to be flexible enough to think beyond those more common uses of the term.

In essence, a campaign is a project—defined by goals and executed over a fixed period of time. The goals may be monetary in nature, such as a campaign to raise $20,000 in donations to fund a new program; it may be measured in numbers, such as a campaign to increase membership by 10 percent over the course of 2 months; or it may be measured by the success...

Referencing campaigns throughout the system

Campaigns provide the glue to connect different records throughout your system. By referencing a campaign in different areas of your site, you associate them with the project and can track your progress toward the campaign goals. In the following different ways, you can connect records to campaigns:

• Activities: When you create an activity, you have the option of linking it to a campaign. Let's say that your project involves phone outreach efforts to potential members. As your staff places those calls, they can create an activity to record the details of the conversation and associate it with a campaign. Activities can also record an Engagement Index—a metric to rate how engaged a certain activity may be considered. For example, sending an unsolicited e-mail to a prospective donor may be a low engagement level (1)—you are initiating the conversation with no assurance of a response. However, if your constituent calls you to discuss their interest...

Surveys and petitions

CiviCRM is open source software and is very much driven and developed, based on the needs of the organizations using the software. In fact, much of the functionality in CiviCRM is a direct result of organizations needing to extend the system to meet a particular need, and then working with the core team to contribute those modifications back to the core software. The campaign tools are one example of this, as they were largely contributed—then later extended—by an organization involved in voter advocacy efforts.

The upside of this model is that CiviCRM is continually being expanded and improved by the community of organizations using it on a daily basis. The downside is that we sometimes get functionality where the initial implementation is very specific and narrow in scope. Over time, it may be more generalized, and yet the remnants of its history are still present. To some degree, we see this to be the case with Surveys and Petitions.

Let's first understand how these...

Summary

In this chapter, we walked through the purpose and use of campaigns as a tool to tie together various resources in the system, and as a mechanism for collecting information from constituents. We demonstrated how petitions are used to build the public-facing forms for soliciting information and positions from visitors. We also demonstrated how surveys are used to facilitate staff and volunteer phone banks and in-person surveys, discussed the intended workflows for ensuring interviewees are handled efficiently, and how duplicate contacts are avoided. We reviewed how campaigns, petitions, and surveys are presented in reports and briefly presented the CiviEngage Drupal module and discussed how it impacts the system.

In the next chapter, we will delve into CiviCRM's fundraising tools and considerations when developing a fundraising plan.