How to add multiple accounts to a campaign in Salesforce?

Salesforce tips

I have been asked recently – “How you can add multiple accounts to one campaign and how can you track the campaigns associated with the accounts”.

Well, that’s an interesting question. It sounds like something basic that should be easy to achieve, but it turns out that it requires a significant effort in order to make it work as expected.

Some organisations, many of them not for profit, target Households, Organisations and Companies without collecting Contact data. For them, using standard Campaign functionality, becomes troublesome and requires some fancy footwork.

So, as this functionality is not available by default, I have recently been looking at the Campaign Companies app from Appexchange. The app comes with a 30-day trial so I had enough time to play with it and see it in action. What’s especially important for non profits, is the fact that it comes with 10 free licenses for non profit organisations (note: mission driven only, no higher-ed or government orgs).

First things first, the app provides much more functionality than just associating Accounts with Campaigns. It comes with handy home page modules and greatly improves the process of managing Campaigns and Campaign Members.

While it is not possible to add Accounts to Campaign Members object, the app provides a ‘junction object’ between Campaign and Account that makes it really easy to track the relationship between those two objects and run campaigns targeting Accounts, instead of Contacts or Leads only.

Let’s have a look at the supported objects:

Home Page
The app comes with useful home page modules for Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, and Campaigns. The modules allow you to search, view and manage records directly from the home page. I have heard about people who use this app only because they love the home page modules.

Campaign

There are some fields and buttons that launch custom wizards to manage campaign members. These buttons are optional depending on how your company uses campaigns.

Custom fields:

• “Enable Campaign Companies”  – Campaign Companies works only for “enabled” Campaigns. This field can be populated manually or automatically with a workflow rule. The Campaign must also be “active”.
• “Update CC Records” – Runs a batch job that will add a Campaign Company record for any contact on the campaign whose company isn’t already listed as a Campaign Company.
• “Delete CC Records” – Runs a batch job that will delete all Campaign Company records for that campaign.

Both fields can be triggered for the campaign being viewed or for all campaigns.

There is one very interesting field on the Campaign object: “Protected”.  This checkbox will lock a campaign and prevent it from being deleted.

Custom buttons:

• Edit/Add Members – quickly add leads and contacts to a campaign and modify or remove existing members on a campaign.
• Quick Add Members – quickly add 10 leads and 10 contacts to a campaign and set each person’s status individually.
• Quick Add Contacts – quickly add 10 contacts to a campaign and set each person’s status individually.
• Quick Add Leads – quickly add 10 leads to a campaign and set each person’s status individually.

Campaign Companies related list:

The core of the campaign page. This is the place where all the Accounts associated with a Campaign are listed.

Account:

• ‘Add to Campaign’ button on Account List View allows you to add up to 200 accounts to an active campaign as a campaign company.
• ‘Add Contact(s) to Campaign’ button on Account detail page allows you to select one or more contacts from the account and add them to the campaign. It will also allow you to select the primary contact from that account for that specific campaign as well as set each contact’s campaign member status for the campaign.
• Campaign History Related List (account details page) – Allows you to see which campaigns the company has been added to as well as take action on the Campaign Company record.

Interestingly, If you add an Account to a Campaign, the Account will be listed on Campaign Companies related list on a Campaign page but Contacts associated to this Account won’t be automatically added to the Campaign as Campaign Members unless you add them manually. In order to do that you will need to click on the Campaign Company record in the Campaign Companies related list on the Campaign object and then using “Add Contacts to Campaign” button, add chosen Contacts. Of course, you don’t need to add Contacts if you don’t want to. You can run a campaign targeting only Accounts as the Campaign Company related list allows you to select campaign status that can match Campaign Member status values.

Contact

• Add to Campaign button on Contact list view allows to select one or more records, up to 200, to add to an active campaign as a campaign member. This will also add the company the contact is associated to as a campaign company if it isn’t already.
• Add to Campaign(s) button on contact detail page, allows you to add the contacts to one or more campaigns at the same time. It will also allow you to set the contact’s campaign member status for each campaign.
• Add Contact to Campaign(s) Button on Campaign History related list on Contact page, allows you to add the contacts to one or more campaigns at the same time. It will also allow you to set the contact’s campaign member status for each campaign.

Lead

• Add to Campaign button on Lead list view, allows to select one or more records, up to 200, to add to an active campaign as a campaign member.
• Add to Campaign(s) button on lead detail page, allows you to add the lead to one or more campaigns at the same time. It will also allow you to set the lead’s campaign member status for each campaign.
• Add Lead to Campaign(s) button on Campaign History related list on Lead object, allows you to add the lead to one or more campaigns at the same time. It will also allow you to set the lead’s campaign member status for each campaign.

Worth mentioning that after lead conversion, the ‘Lead’s’ Account is added to the Campaign.

Other very useful functionality are ‘Campaign Templates’. With Campaign Companies Campaign Templates, users can create specific member status values for each campaign based on the Record Type and Campaign Type. These special member status values can be used in conjunction with or in place of standard Salesforce member status values.

As it doesn’t seem like Salesforce is going to allow multiple Accounts to be added to Campaigns (there is an idea that has posted on Ideas Exchange 10 years ago (sic!) and has received over 1,000 votes but it isn’t currently on Salesforce roadmap ), Campaign Companies may be a great work around for organisations looking to simplify their giving campaigns, track campaign history on accounts or see accounts that have been targeted by a campaign. One important consideration for NPSP users is that the app doesn’t support account affiliations.

Test the app yourself or just let us know if you want us to help you with that!

Link to the AppExchange: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000B4CyhEAF&oid=00DA0000000KjeE

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Przemek Smelcerz is Support Manager at Giveclarity | 5x Salesforce certified |

Giveclarity are a Salesforce partner working exclusively with charities, providing Salesforce consultancy, training and support.