Campaigns are a mechanism to organize and group Communications. Campaigns offer a way to provide special properties to all the communications it contains.

Adding/Editing Campaigns

Name

A name for the campaign is required. It should be unique and descriptive.

Tags

One or more tags can be associated with a campaign. Tags are useful for groups like items together. For instance, you may want all your campaigns used for in your current year communications to have the tag "currentyear". All tags are automatically converted to lowercase when saved. Tags can contain spaces but may not contain commas. If you enter multiple words separated by commas, each word will become a separate tag. You can remove tags by clicking the "x" on each tag.

Message Content Retention

Retain an exact copy of the generated message content for each message. This is useful if you have audit requirements that would dictate you retain an exact copy of each message sent. If this feature is disabled, all message meta data is retained but when you attempt to view the content of a message that has been sent, the message content will be re-generated against a snapshotted version of the associated template with the member attributes. If this feature is enabled, an exact copy of the rendered content will be saved along side the message meta data and retained for the period specified in the "Message Content Retention Period. If this value is not set for the campaign, it is inherited from the Client settings.

Message content retention period

How long to retain the message content of a generated message. When a message is generated to send in Dispatch, a copy of the content of each message is retained in the database. The retention period you specify on the campaign determines how long Dispatch keeps that copy of the message content available. The default is 2.5 years (30 months) and it is defaulted from the client setup. The value can be set to inherit from the client setup or you can override it with a value of 2, 4, 6, 12, 18, 24, 30 or 36 months. You can also elect to never purge the message content.

The message content is purged after the retention period has been exhausted. The purging process runs on a weekly basis. If for some reason you need access to a message's content after it has been purged, we retain database backups for 180 days.

Create Public Archive for all batches

Public Archives are publicly accessible versions of your communications. Any personally identifiable information (PII) about a particular person is replaced with dummy values in this view of the message. You can enable the creation of a Public Archive for all communications by changing this setting to "Yes". You can also opt to do it on a per-batch basis either when scheduling a communication or after a batch is complete.

Visitors browsing your public archives will find the archives organized by campaign. If you do not wish to expose your campaign name to the public, you can provide an alternative title for the campaign that visitors will see when browsing your client's public archives.

Mode

A campaign can be in either Test or Production mode. In Test mode, if a scheduled batch for a communication under the campaign executes, only the first 100 messages will be sent. They will be sent to the either the override email or override phone number depending upon the type of communication attempting to be sent.

Both override email and phone number are required when in Test mode.

In production mode, that restriction is lifted and all messages will be sent to the intended recipient.

Environment Variables

If there is a constant value you want to include to all the communications inside of a campaign, you can use these environment variables to manage those values. For instance, if you wanted to include a link to an annual event web site where the address changes from year to year, you could create an environment variable with a key of "eventWebSite" and separate production and test values for the address. That way, every year you would only need to change the environment variable and the link in all the communications would inherit that value form the campaign.

Viewing Communication Schedules

You can see all the scheduled communications from the main Campaign screen by clicking on the "Calendar View" button.

When the calendar view is showing, you can see upcoming scheduled batches of communications. You can click on any of the scheduled batches to view details, unschedule about the batch.