Activate Marketing Efforts

After you set up and test a marketing effort, you must activate it before sending it to the processing house. Activation “locks in” which records are included in the marketing effort and associates the gifts you receive as a result of the effort with an appeal. After activation, details including the Appeal name, Effort name, Date sent, Segment name, Test segment name, Package name, Source code, and Finder number appear on constituent records that received the marketing effort.

The activation process includes the tasks selected on the Activation tab of the marketing effort or communications template.

These tasks include:

• Recalculate segment counts

• Refresh universe, segments, and exclusions

• Capture data for marketing exclusions report

• Capture historical record of current data for all recipients (SAR)

• Export marketing effort

After you activate the marketing effort, you can use analysis tools such as the Marketing Revenue report to determine the effectiveness of the segments in the marketing effort.

Tip: If the Activate marketing effort task is disabled, you probably did not add segments to the effort yet. If the marketing effort includes segments, check the record source to make sure the gift fields are mapped correctly.

Tip: If you run the duplicate constituents merge process, you should recalculate segment counts before activating the marketing effort. If you do not, you may receive exceptions for constituents that were deleted by the merge process or are now considered duplicates within the marketing effort. From the marketing effort's Activation Status page, you can view the number of exceptions or select Download exceptions to download the exceptions file.

Note: Public media efforts are activated automatically when you create the effort.