When sending gifts over to Virtuous it may be necessary for the integration to create the campaign structure automatically before the gift comes over. For Peer-to-Peer specific scenarios see the article Events Integration Best Practices.
Article Table of Contents
General Best Practices
Order of Operations
General Best Practices
Before going any further, make sure you have a good understanding of the structure in the Events Integration article mentioned earlier. If not, pause here and go read through that article first.
Ok, there are three levels to the campaign structure. Campaign, Communication, and Segment Code. The Segment Code is associated to the Gift when importing gifts. This code identifies which Campaign and Communication the Gift originated from.
Make note that the source system, which you are sending gifts to Virtuous from, may have a different structure entirely. Likely in Virtuous, you will want to know where this gift came from. Was it part of an overarching Campaign? Are there specific landing pages or other initiatives? The Virtuous Campaign structure should reflect that.
Order of Operations
Before the gift is bundled at night through our transaction tool (see Gift Integration Best Practices) any segment codes on the gifts must exist in Virtuous.
This means as new Campaign/Pages/etc are created in the source system, you should first Query for the Campaign Name and also the Communication to see if they already exists in Virtuous. Then create the Segment Code within that structure.
If the Campaign or Communication doesn’t exist, those will need to be created first before creating the Segment Code. If the Campaign does not have an endpoint to create, a Virtuous user will need to create the Campaign in Virtuous first. The Campaign Communication, however, can be created through the API, when doing so, the best practice would be to include the Channel Type (Email, Direct Mail, Radio, TV, Web, Social Media, PR, Event, Advocacy, Other, Peer-to-peer, Phone, or SMS) to make reporting easier to group types together.
Once Campaign and Communication are present, the Segment Code can be created.
Virtuous bundles gifts every night. So, as long as you create the Virtuous Campaign structure (reflecting the structure in your source system), this order of operations will ensure the Segment Code is present when the gifts are processed in the transaction tool later that night.