Best Practices When Organising Activities in FT CRM

A collection of ideas about how we like to organise campaigns in FT CRM.

We are all busy people and spending time on non-revenue producing tasks, such as activity organisation, can feel like a distraction. However, failing to structure effectively now will cost you in efficiency later.
We have put together some best practices to make the most out of your Projects set-up:
  1. ​Why Organisation Matters​
  2. ​Our Favourite Examples​
  3. ​When to Use Which Organisation Method​
  4. ​How to Name Projects​
  5. ​Activities​
  6. ​Takeaways​

🗄️ Why Organisation Matters

It's true that using projects will revolutionise the way you structure and organise activities in FT CRM. It's also true that this new level of organisation will lead to increased productivity and automation. But before you jump in head-first, take a moment to think about why you want to organise activities.
  1. Quick and easy access to the activities you need
  2. Increase productivity - save time and avoid confusion
  3. Meet deadlines
  4. Clear the clutter
  5. Easy internal collaboration
🧙‍♂️ Tip: Spend some time to think about how your activities are set-up and how they can easily be grouped together.
​

💪 Our Favourite Examples

The way you approach the organisation of activities will largely depend on your organisation. Here are our suggestions for how best to organise your projects;
  1. 📒 By campaign
  2. 📅 By calendar month
  3. 🗂 By automated project
​

📒 Organise Projects by Campaign

Campaigns can be planned, pop-up randomly or grow organically from a single activity. It's a good idea to organise these activities into their own project. Have them all in one place for reference, for editing and for analysis.
Here's how we do it;
Campaign Projects
Campaign Projects
​

📅 Organise Projects by Calendar Month

It's a good idea to plan your CRM activities in advance, we like to plan one month at a time. Some activities are reoccurring and are repeated with modifications on a weekly or monthly basis. There are also unique campaigns that occur during this period.
We like have projects set up to reflect all the campaigns running in a particular month, like so;
Monthly projects
Monthly projects
​
🧙‍♂️ Tip: Check out Getting Started With Projects to see how the handy Toolkit can make setting us your monthly CRM a breeze.
​

🗂 Organise Projects by Automated Project

Executing reoccurring activities on a daily basis gets boring fast. Automation can easily solve this problem, allowing us to use our time on more challenging and rewarding activities. But you don't want your automated activities just lying around, group them together into a project to keep them safe.
When it comes to updating your lifecycle campaigns, you'll have all activities handy in one place. For example;
Automated Projects
Automated Projects
​

❓ When to Use Which Organisation Method?

Using a combination of the methods outlined above makes good sense, but it will depend on how your activities have been set up.
List some of the edits you have made recently to your existing activities. Now think about how you approached the task and try to answer these questions;
  1. Was it easy to locate all the activities you needed?
  2. Did you use tags when setting up your activities?
  3. Did you need to edit all activities with a certain tag?
  4. Did you find all the activities you needed easily?
  5. Were you confident you found everything you needed?
The answers to these questions should help you develop the best strategy for you when it comes to organising activities into projects.
🧠 Note: We like to have defined projects for automated projects.
Then we like to categorise all other activities into year (2020), month (April) and campaign (Game Promotions). Some of them are repeated each month and some just occur when they need to.
​

📛 How to Name Projects

How you name your projects will impact on your ability to find them and to understand what they contain. Thoughtful naming will help to promote consistency within a team, remove ambiguity and and avoid naming conflicts.
Here are some tips for when you name your projects;
  1. Be consistent and descriptive
  2. Set up a clear directory structure including;
    1. Title
    2. Date
    3. A unique identifier
  3. Format - e.g. YYYY / MM / DD
  4. Don't deviate
🧠 Note: If the project is date-sensitive then we use the format in example 1

Example 1

Naming a date-sensitive project
Naming a date-sensitive project
​
🧠 Note: If the project is automated then we use the format in example 2

​

Example 2

Naming an automated project
Naming an automated project
​
​

🚀 Activities

Something to consider when grouping activities into projects is that an activity can only belong to one project.
You will be able to see the full list of activities in 'All Activities' as before, regardless of which project an activity belongs to (if any). However, you will only be able to group an activity into one project.
Check out how to set up projects and group activities here;
Getting Started with Projects
/tutorials/projects/getting-started-with-projects
​

🥡 Takeaways

If you put these tips and tricks into practice, you'll be setting up perfect projects in no time.
Keep in mind that you can change your mind about how to organise projects even after you have started. If something isn't working, you can easily delete the project and start again.
🧙‍♂️ Tip: Deleting a project will remove the project and release the activities inside the project back into an 'uncategorised' state.
It does not delete the activities.
​