Campaigns and Appeals: Recreating Your Fundraising Structure in Salesforce
- Peter, Ohana Focus Team
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
By Ohana Focus | January 29, 2026 | 10 min read
For most nonprofit development teams, the Campaign-Fund-Appeal structure in Raiser’s Edge is second nature. They know exactly how to code a gift: Campaign equals the big initiative or fiscal year, Fund equals where the money goes, Appeal equals how they asked for it. Run a query, export to Excel, and create the board report. It’s been working for years.
Then someone mentions that Salesforce will require rethinking this entire structure. The natural reaction is concern: “Wait, we need to change how we track campaigns? But this system works perfectly. Our reports are solid. Our team understands it. Why fix what isn’t broken?”
The truth is that Salesforce doesn’t have the three-tier Campaign-Fund-Appeal structure that Raiser’s Edge provides. However, this limitation isn’t a problem—it’s an opportunity to build something better suited to how your organization actually works.
Why Raiser’s Edge Works the Way It Does
The Campaign-Fund-Appeal hierarchy emerged because it solves three distinct questions that development teams need answered: A development officer receives a $5,000 check. Campaign tells them what broader initiative this gift supports—maybe “FY2026 Annual Giving” or “Capital Campaign for New Building.” Fund tells them where the money goes—“General Operating,” “Scholarship Fund,” or “Building Endowment.” Appeal tells them how the ask was made—“Spring Direct Mail,” “Gala Event,” or “Major Gift Solicitation.”
This separation is elegant: A single gift gets coded three ways, enabling analysis from multiple angles. Want to see how Annual Giving performed this year? Filter by Campaign. Need to track restricted scholarship funds for financial reporting? Filter by Fund. Wondering which solicitation methods work best? Filter by Appeal.
The structure makes sense because it mirrors how development work actually happens. Campaigns are strategic and time-bound. Funds are financial and often permanent. Appeals are tactical and channel-specific.
The Salesforce Reality
Here’s where things get interesting. Salesforce has a Campaign object—but it doesn’t have separate Fund and Appeal objects. And Campaigns can have parent-child hierarchies, but only one hierarchy, not three separate dimensions. This creates a design decision. Organizations moving from Raiser’s Edge need to figure out how to capture the same information we need to run our development operations. The answer depends on what matters most to your organization. We’ve seen three main approaches work successfully:
Keep It Simple with Custom Fields
The most straightforward approach: use Salesforce Campaigns for your campaigns, then add custom picklist fields to the Opportunity object called “Fund” and “Appeal.”
When a gift officer enters a $2,500 donation, they select the Campaign “Annual Giving 2026” from a lookup field, then choose Fund = “General Operating” and Appeal = “Spring Direct Mail” from dropdown lists right on the gift record.
Why this works:
Your team immediately understands it. The structure mirrors what they already know from Raiser’s Edge. Training takes hours, not weeks.
Reporting is straightforward. Create reports grouped by Fund or Appeal using standard Salesforce tools. Filter by multiple dimensions simultaneously. Export when needed.
Data stays clean. Picklist values ensure consistency. No more typos creating “Gen Op,” “Gen Operating,” and “General Ops” as three separate categories.
The trade-offs:
Salesforce won’t automatically roll up totals by Fund or Appeal as it does for Campaigns. You can create reports showing giving by Fund, but there’s no Fund detail page showing current totals, historical trends, or related records.
Tracking solicitation activity becomes harder. With Campaigns, you can track who was solicited, who responded, and analyze response rates. With Appeal as a picklist, you only see it on gifts that came in—not on prospects who were solicited but didn’t give.
Managing the picklists requires ongoing attention. As Funds and Appeals accumulate over the years, the dropdown lists grow longer. Old values need archiving. New values need careful naming.
Best for: Organizations where Campaigns are the primary unit of analysis. Where Fund and Appeal mainly serve as categorization, not as entities requiring detailed tracking themselves. Where reporting needs are relatively straightforward.
Building Deep Campaign Hierarchies within Salesforce
The second approach embraces Salesforce’s Campaign hierarchy capability fully. Everything becomes a Campaign—but organized in parent-child relationships that create the structure you need. Your hierarchy might look like this:
“FY 2026” (top level) → “General Operating Fund” (child) → “Spring Direct Mail” (grandchild).
Each gift connects to the most specific campaign, and Salesforce automatically rolls up all statistics to parent campaigns. When that $2,500 donation comes in, the gift officer searches for “FY26 - General Operating - Spring Direct Mail” and connects the gift there. Salesforce automatically updates totals for that specific appeal, for the General Operating fund, and for FY 2026 overall.
Why this works
Rollup reporting happens automatically. Want to see total giving to General Operating across all appeals? It’s right there on the Fund campaign record. Want fiscal year totals? Already calculated. No custom formulas needed.
Campaign Members track everything. Every appeal becomes a proper campaign where you can record who was solicited, track response rates, and analyze performance. Did 500 people receive the direct mail piece? How many responded? What was the average gift size?
Multi-touch attribution becomes possible. Because everything lives in Campaign hierarchies, you can track how multiple touchpoints contribute to gifts. The donor got the direct mail, attended the event, then received a personal call—Campaign Influence shows the full journey.
The trade-offs
Campaign records multiply quickly. An organization with 5 Funds and 20 Appeals per year creates 100 new campaigns annually. After three years, that’s 300+ campaign records to manage.
Finding the right campaign requires discipline. Gift entry staff face long dropdown lists, and strong naming conventions become critical. “FY26-GenOp-SpringDM” needs to be distinguishable from “FY26-GenOp-SummerDM” and “FY26-Scholarship-SpringDM.”
Reports mix different types. Running a campaign report shows fiscal years, funds, and appeals together. Filtering by campaign type helps, but requires the extra field and consistent coding.
Best for: Organizations needing sophisticated attribution analysis, where understanding the donor journey across multiple touchpoints drives strategy, and where the volume of campaigns justifies the complexity.
Building Custom Fund and Appeal Objects
The most sophisticated approach creates custom objects in Salesforce called “Fund” and “Appeal”—actual database objects with their own records, fields, and functionality.
Each Fund becomes a record with fields tracking purpose, restrictions, balance, spending, and compliance requirements. Each Appeal becomes a record capturing channels, dates, target audiences, budgets, and results. Opportunities (gifts) connect to Campaign, Fund, and Appeal through three separate lookup fields. This most closely mirrors Raiser’s Edge because all three dimensions exist as independent entities.
Why this works:
True multi-dimensional reporting. Analyze giving by any combination of Campaign, Fund, and Appeal. See year-over-year trends by Fund regardless of which Campaigns they rolled up to and track Appeal performance across multiple Campaigns.
Rich object capabilities. Funds can track current balances, spending rates, donor restrictions, and compliance documentation. Appeals can track budgets, timelines, target segments, and ROI calculations, all visible on dedicated detail pages.
Clean separation of concerns. Campaigns stay focused on time-bound initiatives. Funds represent permanent financial structures, appeals capture tactical execution, and each lives in its appropriate context.
The trade-offs:
Implementation requires development expertise. Building custom objects, rollup summaries, validation rules, and reporting tools requires technical skills beyond standard administration.
Higher ongoing costs. Custom objects need maintenance. As business needs evolve, someone with technical knowledge must update fields, automation, and reports.
Training becomes more complex. Staff learn three different objects and their relationships. Gift entry involves more clicks—select Campaign, select Fund, select Appeal.
Best for: Organizations with complex fund accounting requirements. Where restricted gifts demand detailed tracking. Where sophisticated reporting justifies the investment. Where technical resources support ongoing maintenance.
Making the Decision
A development director at a mid-sized health nonprofit recently asked us: “How do we decide? All three approaches seem like they could work.” The answer lies in an honest assessment of five factors:
How complex is your fund accounting?
Organizations with dozens of restricted funds requiring detailed compliance tracking lean toward custom Fund objects. Organizations where most gifts go to general operating costs find picklist fields sufficient.
What drives your strategy?
If understanding multi-touch attribution matters—which touchpoints converted prospects to donors—treating everything as Campaigns provides powerful tools. If you primarily need to know which direct mail piece generated a gift, simpler approaches work fine.
What does your board require?
If board reporting focuses on campaign performance, stick with Campaigns as the primary structure. If they need detailed fund balance reports and spending analysis, custom Fund objects might be necessary.
What’s your technical capacity?
Be realistic about Salesforce expertise. Approach 1 works for any competent administrator. Approach 3 typically requires a developer or experienced consultant.
How does your team naturally think?
Some organizations organize everything around annual campaigns; others think primarily in terms of program funds. Choose a structure matching how your team already works rather than forcing them to think differently. The key insight is to start simpler than you think necessary—you can always add complexity later. It’s dramatically harder to simplify an over-engineered system after staff have learned it and built processes around it.
Critical Implementation Details
Regardless of which approach you choose, these details make or break success.
Naming conventions aren’t optional—they’re critical. Establish clear standards before you start. Include fiscal years, use consistent abbreviations, and make hierarchy levels obvious. For example, “FY26-AnnGiving-SpringDM” tells staff immediately what they’re looking at.
Decide what historical data needs migration
Your Raiser’s Edge database contains years of campaign, fund, and appeal codes. Some organizations migrate everything. Others keep historical data in Raiser’s Edge for reference and start fresh in Salesforce. There’s no universally correct answer—but decide consciously rather than defaulting.
Establish governance immediately
Who creates new Campaigns? Who approves them? Who archives old ones? Without clear ownership, you end up with duplicate records, inconsistent naming, and messy data within months.
Consider integration points carefully
If you use marketing automation, wealth screening, or online giving platforms, how will they interact with your campaign structure? Many tools integrate seamlessly with Salesforce Campaigns, but won’t recognize custom Fund objects without additional configuration.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
We’ve watched organizations stumble in predictable ways:
Building custom objects before understanding actual usage patterns. One organization spent $15,000 building sophisticated custom Fund objects, then discovered six months later that their board only cared about campaign-level reporting. The custom objects sat largely unused.
Applying campaign coding inconsistently
If some gifts have full Campaign-Fund-Appeal coding and others don’t, reports become unreliable. Make critical fields required and train staff on consistent entry.
Designing for administrators rather than users
A structure making perfect sense to the Salesforce admin might be cumbersome for gift processors entering 50 donations daily. Test with actual users before finalizing.
Ignoring year-end logistics. How will you close out campaigns at fiscal year-end? How will you archive old appeals? How will you set up new ones? A structure working smoothly in Year 1 becomes unwieldy by Year 3 without good lifecycle management.
The Three-Approach Framework in Action
The Simple Structure Success: A community arts organization with $3 million in annual revenue chose Approach 1. They have five main funds and run about 15 appeals per year. Custom picklist fields work perfectly. Their development coordinator enters gifts in seconds, finance pulls fund reports monthly, and the executive director gets campaign summaries for board meetings without any custom development.
The Attribution Advantage: A university alumni association raising $25 million annually implemented Approach 2. They track every touchpoint—events, phonathons, direct mail, social media, peer-to-peer campaigns. Campaign hierarchies let them see which combination of touches converts prospects to donors. The complexity is worth it because attribution insights drive their multi-million dollar strategy.
The Compliance Champion: A healthcare foundation managing $100 million in endowments uses Approach 3. They need detailed fund balance tracking, spending rate calculations, donor restriction documentation, and audit-ready reporting. Custom Fund objects provide the sophisticated functionality their compliance requirements demand. The investment pays for itself in reduced audit costs and improved donor confidence.
Moving Forward
For organizations preparing to migrate or recently migrated and still figuring this out, here’s the practical path:
Document your current structure thoroughly. How many active Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals do you have? Look at three years of history. This reveals growth patterns and usage frequency.
Analyze actual reporting needs, not theoretical ones. Pull your 10 most-requested reports from Raiser’s Edge. What dimensions do they analyze? This shows what you actually use, not what you think you need.
Map representative gifts to each approach. Take 10 real donations from last month. Code them under Approach 1, then Approach 2, then Approach 3. Which feels most natural? Which produces the reports you need?
Build a prototype in a sandbox. Don’t theorize—actually build a simplified version of your preferred approach in a test environment. Enter real gift scenarios. Run test reports. Show it to users and watch their reactions.
Get feedback from actual users before finalizing. Gift processors, development officers, and finance staff will reveal usability issues that administrators miss. Their input is invaluable.
The campaign structure decision isn’t just technical—it’s strategic. It shapes how your team works, what questions you can answer, and how easily you can analyze fundraising performance. Make the choice consciously, with input from stakeholders, based on actual needs rather than theoretical perfection.
Partner with Ohana Focus
Design the right fundraising structure for your organization.
Ohana Focus specializes in helping nonprofits design campaign structures that match how they actually work—not forcing them into theoretical models that look good on paper but fail in practice. Our migration experts understand both the technical side of Salesforce and the practical realities of nonprofit fundraising. We help organizations choose the right approach, build it correctly, and train teams to use it effectively. We bring:
Campaign structure design expertise
Custom object development when needed
Team training on fundraising workflows
Ongoing support for reporting needs
Vendor-neutral guidance on best practices
About Ohana Focus
Ohana Focus is a certified Salesforce consulting partner dedicated to helping nonprofits migrate successfully from Raiser’s Edge. We believe great campaign structures aren’t about technical perfection—they’re about matching how your team naturally works. Our migration practice has helped hundreds of nonprofits design fundraising structures that actually get used, from simple picklist approaches to sophisticated custom objects. We make complex decisions manageable and technical implementations practical.
Topics: Salesforce Campaigns, Fundraising Structure, Campaign Hierarchy, Raiser’s Edge Migration, Nonprofit CRM, NPC Fund Accounting, Appeals Tracking
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