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Introducing: Campaign Hierarchies

David Simpson
November 14, 2023

You can now organise your campaigns into "hierarchies", a tree-like structure of "parent-child" records.

Visualise and report on your various campaigns and aggregate their results in a handy new interface in your Beacon account. Note: The Campaign hierarchies feature is only available to customers on Premium and Ultimate plans.

Bring structure to your campaigns

If you run a lot of appeals and outreach campaigns, you might be looking to that you want to report on the success of your campaigns in a few of different ways:

  • Top level: "how successful was our Christmas appeal?"
  • Sub-campaigns: "how successful was the first Christmas appeal email newsletter?"
  • Segmented: "how successful were each of our campaign segments for the Christmas appeal?"
  • A/B testing: "how successful was the Christmas appeal letter (variant A)?"

Hierarchies help you track all of this, with a visual layout to quickly see the success of all of your campaigns in a "tree" 🌲 structure. When viewing a campaign record, click the hierarchy button in the top right.

This will open a dialog that will show you the full campaign hierarchy tree. From this tree view you can navigate to other campaigns in the tree, as well as change the fields that are displayed on these cards.

Calculate totals for each stage of your campaign hierarchy

Say we have 3 campaigns in a hierarchy:

  • Christmas Appeal: to track the overall success
  • Christmas Appeal - Post: to track our direct mail success
  • Christmas Appeal - Email: to track our email newsletter success

In our email newsletter, we can configure our Beacon donation form (or otherwise) to set all payments that come through it as linked to the specific campaign they relate to: Christmas Appeal - Email.

Take a look at the Total and Total (inc. children) fields below:

As donations come in, they'll be summarised on the specific campaign (the email campaign), but are also summarised in the top-level campaign. Pretty cool stuff!

Filtering with hierarchies in mind

You can apply filters to all of a Campaign's children whenever you filter by a campaign. Want to see all of the payments for a given campaign and all of that campaign's child campaigns? Simple:

This will include all of the payment records that point at the child campaigns in the list as well:

Does it work on cards? But of course!

On individual campaign records, you can also use this same option in your related records list, metric, and chart cards:

And even on rollup fields...

In rollup fields, you can include child records in your summaries, which is useful for comparing the amount raised linked to a particular campaign separately from it's child records:

Ready to get started?

You can start organising your campaign hierarchies right away from your Beacon account. You'll find instructions in this guide article for how to use Campaign hierarchies and how to enable this feature on your account. Campaign hierarchies are available to Beacon customers on Premium and Ultimate plans.