Campaigns for Community Promotions

With Polaris Campaigns, libraries can automatically create promotions for existing community or event records, based on terms in the keyword indexed fields in these records. To use Polaris Campaigns, your library must have licenses for Polaris Community Profiles and Polaris Feature It, as well as the separately licensed Polaris Campaigns.

The Campaign workform is used to specify the campaign’s duration; the organization(s) whose community records will be included in the campaign; and the type of community records (organizations, events, or programs/services) promoted in the campaign. It also provides a source of data for the promotions it will create. For example, promotions created by a campaign inherit the activation/expiration date and the owner fields from the Campaign workform. When the Enabled check box is selected on the Campaign workform, a nightly SQL job creates promotions automatically using the information entered in the workform.

To create trigger terms for each promotion, the system uses a logarithmic keyword-weighting ratio (based on the total number of terms to the term frequency in the Community information database) to determine the default keyword index weight “threshold.” The threshold is a minimum weight value that a given keyword term in a community record must contain in order to be included in promotion trigger terms. Any community record keywords with a keyword index weight above the system-calculated threshold are included in the trigger terms on a given system-generated promotion for that record.

The SQL job for campaigns runs every night before the nightly promotions indexing job, so that new promotions are indexed. Successive runs of the SQL job for campaigns delete all existing campaign-generated promotions created by and linked to the campaign, and create new promotions according to any settings saved to the Campaign workform.

Note that deleting a campaign-generated promotion does not prevent the system from recreating the promotion during the next overnight run of the SQL job. If you want to prevent a Campaign from creating (or recreating) a promotion for a given community record(s), you can create a promotion manually and include community record(s) you wish to exclude from the campaign.

Automatic promotions are not created if:

An event is expired.
An event or community record does not display in PAC.
A community or event record is already linked to a manually- created promotion record.

Libraries with Polaris Campaigns can use a Cataloging profile in Polaris Administration to specify a character limit for the headline, midline, and footline fields of Campaign-generated Promotion records. Staff members require these Cataloging permissions to work with Campaigns: Access, Create, Delete, and Modify permissions for Community Profiles, Promotions, and Campaigns.