How do I trigger a campaign on the anniversary of a date?

Quite often we have a situation where we want to communicate with people about some specific recurring date, like a marital anniversary, renewal of a contract, etc. With ActiveDEMAND you can easily track dates and trigger campaigns based time relative to the recurring date.

The Custom Field

To instantiate a campaign that is relative to a contact date, we will either need to make a custom field of the type Date/Time (How do I create a custom field for a contact?) or use a 'named date' object.

If you are using a custom field you can either use the 'Set Custom Field' workflow action, import the date using field mapping with your CRM, import using a CSV file, use the API, or set it manually

The Campaign

This campaign will require a contact changed starting step

For every date/time custom field or special date field, ActiveDEMAND automatically creates a query for 'Next date'

For example, if I want to remind a contact that they need to schedule maintenance after their 'onboard' date. I create a custom field called 'Onboard Date'. ActiveDEMAND will automatically create a Next Date query for my custom field.

This query will trigger for everyone who's 'Next Date' (i.e. next occurrence of this date in the next 12 months) is less than today plus 7 weeks (i.e. Is 7 weeks from today) will match the above query and will pull the person into the campaign. Thus we can trigger a reminder 7 weeks from this 'anniversary'.