What do I do when the Advanced Targeting feature tells me that my alert targets will have a low delivery percentage?

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Judith Carney
Judith Carney
Ancient Membership First Comment Facilitator Level 1
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions
We at Blackbaud have received a lot of questions lately regarding advocacy deliverability issues and the new Advanced Targeting feature. While there is information on these topics in both the Knowledgebase and the help files, it isn’t always easy to find, read, or understand.



I’ve compiled a more “user friendly” version below in the style of a FAQ with references to the supporting documentation. This combines many of the questions clients have asked me over the past several weeks with the information our internal SMEs have provided in the hopes of making it a little easier to locate the specific details that you might need to address your questions.



Where do the statistics from the Advanced Targeting come from and what do they mean to me?
  • How Advanced Targeting works
    • Advanced Targeting gives you a “preview” of the likely email/webform/fax deliverability rate to an Advocacy target by averaging the successful deliveries across all of the Luminate clients for the past 7 days.
  • How accurate is the prediction for my send?
    • Generally the deliverability preview is pretty accurate, but because it is an aggregate number, your results will vary.
    • Advanced Targeting not only shows the results across all clients, it also aggregates all different types of error s (end user, client admin, Blackbaud, or target side).
    • There is more than one way to deliver alerts and the Advanced Targeting feature will show you the delivery statistics for each type that is available for the target. Using a combination of delivery methods (email/webforms/fax) and/or some of the best practices mentioned below, may provide higher than average deliverability.
  • Additional Info:
    • Knowledgebase article BB755683 - “Many targets with delivery failures per the popups when configuring an Action Alert”
Why are there so many targets that have poor delivery?
  • Many paths to one goal –
    • There are many ways to deliver constituent feedback to legislators electronically and there are no regulations or standards that govern that communication. Legislators can have a public email address, a webform, or a fax machine as their main form of electronic correspondence with their constituents. Unfortunately, the variety of options and lack of standards leaves it up to the legislator to implement a communication method that is friendly to bulk organizational delivery.
    • Blackbaud monitors the delivery of alert responses to legislators and works to maintain good deliverability across the board. However, there are instances when a legislator’s webform and/or email address cannot be delivered to using an automated method.
      • In those instances, there is nothing that can be done on the Luminate side to make the forms/email addresses work on the legislator’s side, so we send an automated response to the constituent with the link to the form that can be manually submitted.
    • There is hope on the horizon – the Congressional Management Foundation has been working with technology vendors, advocacy groups, and Congress for the last several years to develop a new standard for delivery. The new method, dubbed “Communicating with Congress” uses APIs to deliver the responses which can handle a significantly higher volume and generate significantly less spam for the legislator. There is currently a push to get the entire Federal House on the CWC method by the end of the year. For the legislators that have already switched over, we are seeing 98% deliverability and higher.
  • Additional information:
Wow that’s a lot of information, but what can I do to get the best delivery for THIS alert?
  • Choose your method of delivery based on the information you are given
    • The purpose of the Advanced Targeting functionality is to give you an idea of how successful the webform/email/fax method is for the legislators you are targeting. Ideally, you can use this information to better select the method and strategy of your alert.
    • For example, if you choose a list of legislators and the majority of them show a high failure rate on webform delivery, you might want to consider faxing to them or using the “print responses” functionality and delivering the responses via another method.
  • Consider the volumes and the timeframe you are working with
    • The webforms, email systems, and fax machines that legislators have set up can be somewhat fragile when inundated with messages from advocacy organizations.
      • Even if you are only delivering a few thousand messages over the course of a few days, there might be 10-20 other orgs doing the same thing at the same time. All that volume adds up and can cause the email servers/webforms to temporarily go down – much like when you open too large of a file on your computer and have to restart the program because it locks up.
    • If you are expecting a high volume of responses (in the thousands), you should consider using the “Delivery Pacing” option available on alerts.
      • The Delivery Pacing option allows you to throttle the alert deliveries so that you don’t overwhelm the webform/email system/fax machine on the receiving end. It allows you to define how many responses to attempt to deliver per hour and to define when to turn off the pacing.
    • Delivery Pacing may require support assistance to make the feature accessible to you, if you do not see it on your alert screen.
    • Additional information:
  • Use the reporting tools available
    • Once you send your alert, Luminate Online has two reports that can help monitor deliverability:
  • Have a back-up plan
    • Depending on the amount of time you have to get the responses delivered, you might want to consider turning on the “rollover to fax” option when you set up your alert. The rollover to fax option will make an attempt to deliver the response via webform/email, and if it fails, will then attempt to deliver the response via fax.
    • If you are not operating on a tight timeline, you can leave the “roll to fax” option turned off for the first send and use the Alert Delivery reports to determine how successful you might be with retrying the webform delivery.
      • For example, if you have a 50% success rate on all forms, then retrying the failed alerts might successfully deliver the majority of the responses.
      • If you have a 100% failure on a certain set of forms, you might want to start the roll to fax option earlier.
    • Retrying a failed alert that has fax enabled will attempt to retry the fax if the other delivery methods continue to fail.
  • Use your network
    • One of the best things you can do when you are sending a response to a legislator is to follow-up with someone in that legislator’s office to see if they received your constituent responses. If they are having trouble, consider asking them to look into the Communicating with Congress recommendations put out by the CMF as an alternative to whatever method they are using.
    • Attend the Advocacy focused webinars offered by Blackbaud for the latest information on advocacy strategy and deliverability trends:
I hope this helps!

Judith
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