Arguably the best thing about working on the Salesforce platform is that it is in fact a platform and that we are part of an international community of users, administrators, developers and innovators.
Sometimes the best solution to a problem requires getting some help from that community.
We’ll feature some apps from the Salesforce AppExchange (and beyond) that we love, on a regular basis.
AAkonsult Campaign Status
The Campaign object in Salesforce is a flexible and vital tool for tracking marketing and fundraising efforts for non-profits. It’s been around since the early days of Salesforce, and as such, there are some quirky things about the metadata behind the object.
One of the most perplexing things about using Campaigns is figuring out how to customize the Campaign Member Status field on the Campaign’s partner object, the Campaign Member -- the field that lets you track if/how people have responded to your campaign.
By default, the Status field ships with a few generic values -- Sent, and Responded. It’s expected that you probably have more or different values that you want to track, so like all fields in Salesforce, you can customize the picklist values. But unlike all other fields in Salesforce, if you go to add them by going to Setup | Customize | Campaign Members | Fields, you will find no “New” button.
The only way to add custom values to the Status field is to go to a specific campaign and click “Advanced Setup.”
That's where you can add new custom member statuses, but weirdly, you can’t apply those values to all future Campaigns. They have to be added individually each time. It’s really odd!
Enter AAkonsult's Campaign Status app. This free app (which takes just a few minutes to install and configure) lets you create customized default statuses for your organization and lets you apply those defaults to all future campaigns. Or, if you have different types of campaigns that are suited to their own set of defaults, this app lets you have a different set of defaults for each Campaign Type.
I’m so happy this app exists because it makes it easier for organizations to adopt Campaigns in Salesforce, and makes it more likely that their Campaign Member Status values are relevant and accurate.