CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello folks, our non-profit is starting their first capital campaign - a 7-year campaign that will have multi-year pledges, lead tracking, and so on.  They would like to track the campaign and leads within Civi (which we've already implemented and love for our operational use).

What is the best way to set up a capital campaign in Civi?  Here is what we need:

• A general "campaign" entity with information/fields about the campaign itself (term, goals, etc)
• Custom Fields for contacts that are tied to that campaign entity - so we would have things like "lead priority", "capacity estimate", "potential ask", and several other fields that are tied to a Contact and the Campaign entity.
• Historical tracking of lead activities (meetings, calls, etc) for the campaign (we can use Activities for this).
• Pledges tied to the campaign entity (not just general pledges)
• Contributions tied to those pledges or directly to the campaign (without a pledge)

In some ways, the hierarchy feels like an Event with Participants (so information is at the participant level, not at the higher Contact level).  But I'm not sure that's the right way to do it and it seems more cumbersome for admins to use participants in this case.  Would CiviCampaign be the right approach here?

We'd love some opinions on the best design for something like this - I'm guessing some of you have already gone through this and have some good ideas.  Thanks!