CiviCRM for The Giving Circle. Managing Mailings

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CiviCRM for

The Giving Circle

Managing Mailings

By

Leo D. Geoffrion & Ken Hapeman Technology for the Public Good

Saratoga Springs, NY Version 1.2

5/27/2013

1. Introduction

CiviCRM includes a very power mail tool for organizing the email and postal mail communications with your contacts. These can be used to send messages to individuals, any group, or the entire contact list. While this guide covers email communications, it can also generate PDF documents for printing and sending via USPS.

Some key background concepts: Messages can contain three parts:

• Header: Text appearing at the beginning of the message, typically containing the organization’s logo and other similar information.

• Body: The main content of the message.

• Footer: Text at the end of the message, typically containing contact email addresses, web site URL, and related links.

Templates can exist for all three parts:

A template is essentially a pre-written message component, intended to save time when one often sends similar messages to many individuals. The sender typically can adjust the template to fit each specific mailing.

Tokens:

Tokens are placeholders for personal information about each donor. When these are inserted into a template, the mailer replaces the token with the corresponding database information before sending the message.

Mail Bounce:

A bounced message is one that is returned to the sender as undeliverable. Mail senders are expected to pay attention to these bounces and some sites will black-list a sender who repeatedly sends email to invalid addresses. There are two levels of bounces. Some are “hard” because they indicate a permanent problem such as the address is invalid. Others are “soft” because they indicate temporary issue such as “mailbox full”.

In CiviCRM, hard bounces place an email address “On-hold” immediately, while soft bounces create a hold following three consecutive failures. The “Managing Contacts” documentation describes how to clear addresses from this state. Message Opened Tracking:

This tracks how many people open (or read) the message. It does this by embedding an invisible image within the message.

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Click-Through Tracking:

This technique encodes all web links within an email message to route through CiviCRM, thereby allowing it to track how many recipients click on each of the links.

Opt-out:

The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 requires that all bulk mailings include a link to permit the recipient to opt out of receiving future bulk emails from the sender. While the law has no real enforcement power, all reputable organizations now include this option.

CiviCRM supports both informal and bulk mailings. Informal mailings

These are little different from the personal emails that staff send from their individual email accounts. CiviCRM adds the feature of logging all messages sent through the application into the activity log for each recipient.

Bulk mailings

These are sent to groups of contacts and typically contain announcements, newsletters, renewal reminders,…. CiviCRM implements advanced mail features into the bulk mailings including: opt-out, click-through tracking, message-opened tracking and bounce processing.

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2. Sending Informal Emails

Why use CiviCRM, when you can use your favorite email program?

• When you use CiviCRM to send email messages, the program maintains a record of the communication within the activity log. This helps other staff to be aware of prior communications with a contact.

• The informal emails can include tokens to merge database information into the message.

• You can pre-define templates to save time when you find yourself frequently sending similar emails to various contacts.

Here’s how:

Click the Actions button when viewing a contact record,

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To add a template to the message, click the “- select –“ bar at the “Use Template” prompt. CiviCRM responds with a list of available templates:

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You can insert tokens within the subject line or the message body by clicking the “Insert Token” button next to each section. This opens a select box to choose among the most frequently-used tokens:

You can either scroll through the menu of tokens, or begin typing the token in the box to narrow the list of options.

Within the email itself, a token appears like this: {contact.email_greeting}

Its structure consists of {component name dot field name}. Advanced users can employ additional tokens by entering them using the above format.

TIP: A good way to learn more about the gamut of available tokens is to examine the System Workflow Messages described in chapter 5 of this guide.

When you click “Send Email”, CiviCRM replaces the token with the corresponding database information.

2.1 Integrating CiviCRM with your personal mail client

Many people strongly prefer using their personal email client for information communications because it is more familiar and always readily available.

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When addressing the email, use BCC: (blind corresponding copy) to send a copy to: cc@thegivingcircle.org

CiviCRM then adds a copy of your email into the activity log for the recipient. If this person has no contact record, it creates a new contact for this email address.

TIP: It’s better to use BCC: instead of CC: when adding this address because that keeps this address hidden from the recipient. Always be careful to keep this address hidden from spammers. Otherwise, your contacts can become cluttered with junk

addresses.

It is not worth logging every single email communication with your contacts, but this can be an easy and valuable means to log the important communications that you want to become part of the ongoing history of your organization’s communications.

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3. Sending Bulk Emails

Creating a group of recipients is the first step in sending a bulk mailing. Once the group is defined, the bulk mailer employs the following steps:

a. Select the group of recipients.

b. Decide what message tracking is desired. c. Compose the message content.

d. Test the mailing.

e. Schedule the mailing for delivery.

3.1 Create or update a group of recipients

Because bulk mailings are always sent to groups, there must exist a group that contains your intended recipients.

CiviCRM supports two types of groups. Reserved groups require special rights to modify their contents. The Board of Directors is an example of such a group, since clearly only authorized individuals should be permitted to change its contents. All other groups may be created, updated, or destroyed as needed to support group mailings.

3.1.1 Create a new group

Use either the “Find Contacts” or “Advanced Search” to generate a list containing the contacts to whom you wish to send the bulk mailing.

Once the contacts have been found, click the radio button to select all of the contact records from your search, and then choose “Add Contacts to Group” from the select box of “- actions –“.

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This triggers the follow-up page:

Click “Create New Group” and then enter a name for this group. The list is now ready for use in a bulk mailing.

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3.1.2 Update an existing group

You may need to update the contents of an existing group in order to assure that it includes the latest membership.

Use the following steps if a group may contain “stale” contacts – ones that should be removed from the group before using it for the mailing.

1. Use Find Contacts to retrieve the contacts currently included in the group (in this example, I’ve chosen a group named “test update.”

2. Select either the individual contacts to be removed, or select all records in the group.

3. Choose “Remove

Contacts from Group” in the Actions select box, and click Go.

Select the desired group in the resulting page, and click “Remove from Group”

Once the stale contacts have been removed, you can employ the steps in section 3.1.1 to add new contacts to the group. CiviCRM automatically assures that no individual contact is entered more than once in a group.

3.2 Bulk Mailing 1: Select group

Click on the Mailings menu.

Use “new Mailing” to start a mailing. Draft returns to one started earlier.

Scheduled returns to one previously sent. The balance of this guide focuses on new mailings.

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New Mailing opens a form to structure the process:

First, enter a name for your bulk mailing. This name serves to identify the mailing and does NOT appear in the message itself.

Next, set the group(s) that should receive the mailing by clicking on the group followed by the “Add >>” button.

You can also exclude specific groups. The bulk mailing then goes to all of those in the included groups except for any that are found in the excluded group(s).

Next >> continues to the next stage.

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3.3 Bulk Mailing: Track & Respond

Set these as desired.

Click-Throughs are useful if your mailing contains links to other web pages. When activated, users are routed through a tabulator before visiting the web pages, thereby permitting a count of how many recipients visit each of the pages referenced in the mailing.

Track Opens adds an invisible image to the body of the html-formatted message, thereby allowing it to track whenever the recipient opens the email message. It serves as a rough measure of how many people read the mailing.

Track Opens has two major limitations:

• It cannot track recipients who have opted to receive plain-text emails, because it is not possible to embed an image within plain text messages.

• It cannot track recipients who have disabled image loading within their mail client. Fortunately, mostly skilled computer users who are concerned for personal

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3.4 Bulk Mailing: Mailing Content

Here, you can insert a template in addition to composing a message from scratch. You can also add tokens. It also includes automatically the mailing header and footer unless you specifically opt out of using them.

You can also upload to body of your message from your desktop computer. If you choose this option:

• Compose the message using Word or some equivalent tool and then use “Save As” to save it in html format for the formatted email message.

• The use “Save As” to save it in plain text format as well.

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3.5 Bulk Mailing: Test

Unless you are very advanced at composing mailings, you should always test the mailing to assure that its format is fully correct and that your message is clear and correct. Badly composed messages can lose participants quickly.

You can enter a single email address into the “Send to this Address” box or select a small group via the “Send to This Group.” Use the group option, for example, if this mailing is a committee project, thereby allowing the committee members to review it prior to its public release.

3.6 Bulk Mailing: Schedule or Send

You can send the bulk mailing immediately or schedule it for a future date & time. It is wise to schedule very large mailings to be done overnight since they can impose a substantial load on server resources.

Note: Send Immediate is not instant. It queues the message to the bulk mailer, which runs several times daily. Some time may pass before it actually is sent.

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4. Monitoring Bulk Mailings

Use “Draft and Unscheduled Mailings” to search for mailings that have not been completed. This is handy if you want to resume work on a mailing. Use “Scheduled and Send Mailings” to search for mailings that have been scheduled for delivery or delivered. This is handy to check on a prior mailing.

The second option presents the following summary information:

You can use the search form to narrow the mailings listed on the page. Status typically shows one of the following:

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The next columns show who created the mailing and who finally submitted it for delivery, followed by the date/time for each processing milestone.

Click “Report” for a summary report on the mailing (see 4.1 below).

Click “Re-Use” to create a new mailing based on the prior one. You will still have the ability to modify all of the mailing settings and adjust its contents.

More offers two additional options:

Delete erases the mailing and its delivery information from the database.

Use this only for test mailings or other clearly useless mailings. Archive removes the mailing from the active list, without erasing any of its

data. Archived mailings can be restored or accessed in the future.

4.1 The Bulk Mailing Report

Clicking the “Report” button displays an overview of the mailing, beginning with a delivery summary:

Clicking “Report” on the right of each item displays additional information. For example, it can provide a list of the contacts that opened the message, or those that bounced.

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Clicking “Advanced Search” permits you to perform more sophisticated searches among the contacts in that category. For example, you could use this to see how many of the tracked opens were contacts who donated in the last 6 months.

The remainder of the mailing report documents the specifics about this mailing, including all settings chosen during its creation.

4.2 Other Bulk Mail reports

The “Reports” menu provides access to additional reports about bulk mailings. These differ from the report described above in that they can summarize across all recent mailings.

Use “Mail Summary Report” for an overview of all recent mailings.

Use “Mail Bounce Report” for a list of all contacts whose mail address bounced. These represent contacts that should be checked and corrected.

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5. Managing Message Templates

Templates are standard messages that can become the basis for both informal and bulk emails. They basically save time by providing standard content that the individual can then adjust to fit each specific setting.

Templates divide into two groups:

User-driven Messages The ones users employ when composing mailings. System Workflow Messages Those used by automatic processes to communicate

with the public

The “Message Templates” command in the “Mailings” menu offers a summary of the currently-defined templates:

Edit allows you to update the content of that template. Each template exists in both plain text and html format.

Disable allows you to block use of that template without erasing it from the system. Use this, for example, for seasonal messages or for message templates that are not ready for general use.

Delete removes the template permanently from CiviCRM. It has no impact on

previously sent mailings based on that template. Use this only for templates that have no further use to the organization.

System Workflow Messages are templates sent out automatically by CiviCRM based on specific events:

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Because these messages are required by the system, you cannot disable or delete them. You can edit them to adjust their wording to fit your organization’s specific communication goals.

CAUTION: Do not modify the System Workflow Messages unless you are a skilled user and always test to assure clear and proper communications – particularly since these are sent automatically by the CiviCRM system. Edit these very carefully, because they contain a large number of tokens that relate closely the events that trigger the mailing.

5.1 Header & Footer Templates

In bulk mailings the Header appears before the start of the message body and the footer comes at the end of the message body.

Users with “Administrator” rights are the only ones who can modify these two templates. In general, they should remain the same for all bulk mailings.