How do you adjust Program Membership date in Marketo? Marketo limitation?

[Anonymous]

Overview
We have a bunch of legacy SF Campaigns that we want to sync to Marketo Programs so we can do historical membership and opportunity analysis in RCA.
 
Challenge
The SF Campaign sync to the Program worked great to pull in all legacy SF Campaign members. However, the Program membership date is set at the time of the sync so all membership shows up in November 2013--This is expected behavior.
 
We want the membership dates to more closely parallel the First Responded date for the SF Campaign. We have a lot of Campaigns to do this to so rolling up membership to the first date of a quarter is fine for now.
 
Actions Performed
I created a series of Smart campaigns to change the Program Success date based on the First Responded date. For example, if the SF First Responded date fell between Oct and Dec of 2013, set the Success date to October 1, 2013. In theory, this will allow us to do quarterly reporting in RCA.
 
What Doesn’t Work
The next day after making the changes to the Program I went into RCA to check out the results.
 
All the Oppty influence reports are working as I had hoped as they are based on the Success date.
 
The big issue is the Program Membership reports are NOT working. They still show all members in November. It’s like the membership date didn’t change when we changed the Success date.
 
Questions
 
·         Is there a flow step for changing Program membership date that is separate than Success date?
·         Is there a bug in Marketo? It seems that if you change the Success date to a date that is before the Program membership date, the Program membership date should change to the Success date.
·         Other solutions?
*         Am I doing something incorrectly?

[Anonymous]

Maybe try adjusting the cost tages to refect the actual start date of the programs? Not ideal but worth a shot...

[Anonymous]

Mark, I haven't tried that. Would be an easy fix if it worked.

[Anonymous]

Yah...especailly on a Friday! Let me know if it works...

[Anonymous]

Mark, no luck on the costs. I was really hoping that would work. I added in costs for the past year yesterday and the membership report still shows membership at the time all the SF campaign members synced over to Marketo Program (November). I have submitted a case to support.

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I had the same issue about 2 months ago while updating success steps to my older programs.  Every success showed the date at which I ran the udpated campaign instead of the date I selected in the flow steps.  

Per Marketo's Support, there was a "known bug" causing this and as of a few weeks ago I was notified that they are hoping to have this worked out for the December updates release.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jessica, I am waiting to hear back from Marketo on a status.

[Anonymous]

For anyone interested, Marketo did confirm that this issue is known. Like Jessica said, they are working on a fix which would be rolled out in the mid December release.

[Anonymous]

Hello Jeff,

Did your issue ever get solved?

Are you able to effectively backdate acquisition and success dates via the two flows below to influence FT + MT reporting based upon those dates and not the sync dates? Also, anybody have any new ideas on how to not do this manually for each date individually?

Thanks!

All the best,

Andrew

[Anonymous]

Hi Andrew, sorry I was away. No, I didn't find a solution. It was a known issue and wasn't a big enough deal to put in more work. It got categorized as legacy data and management never asked after the limitation was communicated.