CiviCampaign needs to be split up?

[bl-admin]

I may be the only one who thinks this.

It seems that there's two faces to CiviCampaign, one side, the "wageing a campaign with direct mail and website donations and phone calls, etc ..." and the the other face looks like a political campaign with survey's and petitions.

To me the, first face is project donation tracking, the second is voter tracking.

Would it be ok to suggest that maybe the project donation tracking gets seperated out and added to civicontribute? and that the political part can keep being called civicampaign? That way political modules can be enabled or disabled based on the type of organization it is.

[xavier]

Not quite sure what feature(s) you are referring to for the first phase. Is this being able to "tag" activities as part of a campaign?

The second "political" one is probably a naming issue, that's more about engagement (either through your staff/volunteers or online directly) than "political" per se. I've used the "political" survey feature for a phone canvassing to call their members and remind them to attend/register a big event they organised for instance. Not really political

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[The Next Wave]

I too find the terminology confusing- the same terminology is used for different things in Civi which is a UX no-no.
Canvassing isn't a campaign.
Fundraising isn't a campaign.
Email blasts aren't a campaign.
A campaign should be "get so and so elected"- since you can have a party with many different ongoing campaigns for different candidates.
Canvassing is a part of that campaign- as is fundraising- as are email blasts.
Just changing this around would improve understanding to users.

[petednz]

Canvassing isn't a campaign.
Fundraising isn't a campaign.
Email blasts aren't a campaign.

Based on our experience I would disagree. We work with several political parties and many other organisations who are out to achieve political change. The latter are more likely to use 'campaign' to track how people engage with a 'project' - who donated, who came to fundraising events, who came to promotional events, than are the former.

[The Next Wave]

@Petednz-
What's a project now?
I don't know of Projects in Civi.

This is the problem- the terminology is all over the place.
You can't have the same word mean 12 different things.
It's bad for UX.
This program is unnecessarily complex- and a large part is the learning curve- thanks to the terminology being used in an unstructured manner.
 

[petednz]

I didn't introduce the term 'project' here.

To me the, first face is project donation tracking, the second is voter tracking.

The term project is not used in civicrm and I am not trying to introduce it.

A campaign should be "get so and so elected"

My point was meant to be that Organisations that run 'project donation tracking' and which are  non-political organisations still run 'campaigns' and think of them as campaigns - they campaign to save penguins, they campaign to restore buildings, they campaign to make roads safer for cyclists.

It seemed your contention was that 'campaign' should only political.

But putting that aside.

I agree we need to use terminology consistently and in a way that makes sense to users. But we also need to avoid assuming that the way we use terminology is the 'only' way.

[The Next Wave]

Agreed- a campaign to "Save the penguins" is a campaign- run by an organization like World Wildlife Federation or such- and that they may have a "Campaign to save the whales" too-
but- an email campaign- no.
It's an email blast as part of that campaign- or it is a blast to all members- but- has elements to define the "Save the penguin" campaign- but calling email campaigns- or walking lists- campaigns is what is screwy about civi. It confuses users and admins alike.

[petednz]

but calling email campaigns- or walking lists- campaigns is what is screwy about civi. It confuses users and admins alike.

I hadn't looked at it like that - I see the ability to 'tag' an email blast or an event or a walk-list as 'related to Campaign X' as a good option.

[The Next Wave]

I try to approach all UX projects with beginners mind.
I remember watching people struggle with the >_ prompt in the early days of DOS- after I'd learned the gospel of the Mac.
There is no going back.
Unfortunately- Civi is very flexible- has many visions of what it should do- many contributors- and terminology has been misused and confused.
The idea of "Profiles" for form data sets is another abuse of terminology- as a "profile" is usually a data set attached to a user-
not a subset of data for a user or anything else.
It's little things like this- that, piled on top of each other - make civi way more complicated than need be.

[xavier]

Hi,

We've had discussions about using tags instead of a new entity type campaign, as peter described if I remember well.

That's how I describe them, as a way of bundling together emails and activities and other fundraising stuff into the same bag of stuff, like tags for contacts activities and cases.

Where do you see "email campaign"? Is this in the UI somewhere or only a documentation/discussion in the forum where we aren't precise enough?

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[The Next Wave]

Xavier- Sorry- I should have left email out- it doesn't use the word "campaign" (another tool I use does).
My biggest problem is in the way we reserve respondents, build walk lists- etc. as well as in fundraising- donations.
A clear definition of the difference between tags, groups and smart groups would be a helpful part of a manual.

[xavier]

A clear definition of the difference between tags, groups and smart groups would be a helpful part of a manual.

The most honest answer about tags, groups, contact type and custom fields is that they all can be used to segment your contacts. They started filling rather separate niches, but overtime they grew and you can experience quite an overlap on what they offer today.

Some of these tools work better in some cases, eg groups makes it easier to create ACL or mailings and tags work as well for activities and cases. It's convenient to mix to be able to get contacts of type A AND with tag B AND in group C.

We tried to come up a common definition of what works best in which case a few years ago. It turns out that different organisations use different tools to fill the same need and that none is "wrong". It's good to be flexible, but the con is that "there is more than one way of doing it" and "it depends"

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[The Next Wave]

I teach people how to use WordPress- and there is a lot of confusion of how to use Posts/Pages/Categories/Tags-
I've at least generated a few instructional graphics and analogies that help people grasp them.

Once you define things using these tools- we need an easy integrated tool set to be able to remove tags, groups, - and merge etc-
this is all much easier once you define the use case.

There should be clear ways to figure this out- and what they are meant for.
One thing- I wanted to create a group for donors- for particular campaigns. The screwy part of civi- when I generate a report of donors- the tools to put them into a group- just aren't there. This is inconsistent behavior- and maddening to someone who thinks about this stuff like me.