CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

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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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.

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.

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.

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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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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