What are projects and campaigns?

A project is a named body of work inside one team, with a lead, dates, and tasks under it. A campaign sits above projects and spans teams. If What are tasks? answers "what am I doing today", this section answers "what are we working towards".

Fairgreen Golf Co. runs a campaign called Autumn drop. Under it sit a Marketing project for the shoot and the emails, and a Production project for the sampling and the factory dates.

What does a project give you that a task list does not?

Four things, all of which are the answer to a question somebody asks in a Monday meeting.

• A lead. One named person accountable, set separately from who is assigned the tasks.
• Dates. A start and a target, which is what puts the project on a timeline as a bar.
• Milestones. Dated checkpoints inside the project, so "samples approved" is visible without being somebody's to-do.
• Progress. A live count of scope against completed, with a percentage bar and open-task counts per person, computed from the tasks and their sub-tasks rather than typed in.

A project also gets its own Overview, List, Board and Calendar, so the team working in it has everything in one place.

Why does a campaign exist above that?

Because the work of a launch does not sit in one team, and no single project can hold it.

The Autumn drop needs Marketing, Production and Warehouse. Each of those wants its own project with its own lead and its own board, and the person running the launch needs to see all three on one timeline.

That is what a campaign is: the band across the roadmap that the separate projects hang from. A project points at one campaign, and a campaign spans as many teams as it needs.

When would you use each one?

Start a project when a piece of work has several tasks, a person accountable for it, and an end. "Autumn lookbook shoot" is a project. "Book the studio" is a task inside it.

Start a campaign when two or more teams are working towards the same date. If only one team is involved, a project on its own is enough and a campaign adds a layer for nothing.

Use a cycle when you want a time-box rather than a body of work. A cycle is a named, dated container that cuts across every team and project at once, which is a different shape from both. See How to set up and work in cycles.

What is something else better for?

• Work that never ends, like a weekly stock count, is a repeating task rather than a project. See How to make a task repeat.
• A thing you are tracking rather than a body of work you are doing is a record. See What is an Object?.
• A plan of what goes out and when, before any of it is real work, lives on a project's Overview as planned items. See How to plan what goes out and when.

Read this section in order

How to start a project is the place to begin, and covers the properties that matter on day one. How to add and reschedule milestones adds the checkpoints.

How to set up a campaign is worth reading once you have more than one team working towards a date. How to use the roadmap is where all of it comes together on one timeline, and it is the screen most people end up living in.