Marketing Efforts Imports in Blackbaud CRM™

By: Sara Swiatlowski

Marketing Effort in Blackbaud CRM™ are a powerful tool where all of your marketing campaign information lives. Within the functional area there are lots of pieces that you are using to set up a marketing effort. Even a very simple marketing effort will include a name, an appeal, a source code, segments, packages which may or may not have a letter attached to them, package costs, ask ladders, an export definition, and the list goes on. When you are doing setup for a new effort you have to pull all of these pieces together and whether you are reusing pieces that have already been setup or you are creating new pieces it all takes time before you are ready to calculate the effort.

When you create the effort you have several options about how to pull it all together. You could add your segments individually one by one. You could leverage a segment group to add many segments at one time. Or you could use the Marketing Effort Import feature that is built into Blackbaud CRM™. Utilizing Import for your Marketing Effort can save you a lot of time, especially if you are working on a complicated effort. In addition to putting all of the pieces together through import, you can also create new items, like packages or segments, in this process if they don’t already exist in your system. Even better, you could set up segments and packages for more than one marketing effort in a single batch!

These are the steps you will take to Import a Marketing Effort.

1. Setup a new Marketing Effort shell and add any exclusions you may need to consider for the effort.

2. Create your file for import, this is what you’ll use in the batch import process to create your segments, packages, lists, list vendors, and even test segments.

   • Tip: You can Generate a Header File in the Import area to see what fields are available for import. You only need to include the fields that you want to import.

   • In this sample below I’m bringing 2 segments into my effort. The first row is a new segment and a new package so I’ve filled out all of the fields. The second row is an existing segment and package so some fields are blank.

   • You will always need to include Segment name even if you are adding a segment that already exists in the system, make sure it matches exactly or it’ll be treated as a new segment.

3. Configure your import utilizing the Direct Marketing Effort Batch template and mapping your fields.

4. Run the Import to create the new items and add those new items, as well as the existing ones, into your marketing effort.

Now that your segments are available in the Marketing Effort, you’ll be able move forward with the effort. If you’ve created new segments you will need to attach your segment selections to them before you calculate your totals, or you can skip this step if you’ll be bringing constituents into the effort using a Segmented House File. Similarly, if the Package needs to have a letter attached to it, you’ll have to edit the newly created package to add that.

As you can see, with a little bit of setup you can streamline the creation of Marketing Efforts by using an import batch!