Managing multiple email addresses.

Jennifer Hunter

Hi there, I'm trying to find best practices regarding the handling of multiple email addresses in RE.  We seem to have too many choices and want to trim it down a bit - but we're also faced with new importing software - Import-o-Matic - that is adding another level of complication.  Does anyone ou there have any tips?

Doreen Ha

Hi Jennifer,



Just wondering which version of Raiser's Edge are you using? We are on v7.92 with phone types: home, home_alt, business, business_alt, direct line, e-mail, e-mail_alt, old-home, old-email, old-business, etc. We do this as some of our constituents have one or two business, home, and email numbers. We keep old phone types on file.  I heard Import-o-matic can map to current phone types.



Hope that helps!

Doreen

Holly Herbert

Hi everyone! I'm going to pull Becky's posts out of this thread, as she is working in Blackbaud CRM, not Raiser's Edge, and that might muddy the waters a bit, so to speak.



Apologies for not catching this sooner!



Holly

Patrick Edwards

We're using RE 7.95 and ImportOmatic and Netcommunity.


This quesiton is still unanswered and I would welcome further discussion.


To restate the question: How are folks managing multiple email addresses for one constituent, particularly when NetCommunity is limited to one email type while integrations built with ImportOmatic may be continually providing RE with a mulitple email addresses for a single constituent?

Anne Herbert

We store the emails with different types (Email - Business, Email 2, Email 3, etc.) and we use Email - Preferred for our primary email and that is what is defined in BBNC.  Data entry people know that if there is no type of Email - Preferred on the record then the person will not receive an email no matter how many other email types there are.  So any time an email is found to be invalid it is marked as either Email - Bad or Email - Former and if another email exists it's type is changed to E-mail - Preferred.  The only time the same email address is in 2 different types is for Business emails (this isn't necessary we decided to do this in case we ever wanted to send an email out of BBNC to just the type of Email - Business, but we've never done that).

Anne Herbert

Forgot to mention that we are the same config as you (7.95, BBNC and IOM).  When I import via IOM the new types go in as one of our valid types.  I turned off the ability to have duplicate types in 7.95, so IOM increments the email types as Email 2, Email 3, etc.  This is problematic for our Email - Preferred's because it creates a type of Email - Preferred2 if one already exists, so after each import I run a quick cleanup query and take care of the handful of records that this occurs on.

Patrick Edwards

I hadn't thought of using the numbered types (email2, email3) only temporarily as part of a cleanup. Will need to think through that some more...


The cleanup happens any time someone updates their email address (assuming your IOM source is your constituent) or any time you are provided with a distinct email address for a constituent?


Cleanup is something like: change type or archive value of pref1 email for for any record with email2+, then change type for email2+ to email1?


For us this would happen more than a handful of times each import.


Also, so you are not really using the Preferred checkbox at all...

 

Patrick Edwards

Sorry, lost the terminology there!


pref=email


pref1=email1

Anne Herbert

The cleanup occurs in 2 ways.  Part of my procedure when I load records via IOM is to immediately do a query on the records I just added and I review and clean immediately.  You can do this either through query output on the screen or my prefered method is to use export and then do excel rules to compare each column of emails and then I manually update in RE (I would import but I'm not willing to do that until Blackbaud fixes the issue with importing phones/emails change the date on all phones/emails to be today's date).


Yes cleanup is change the types as you mentioned.  We have some people with 5 emails on their records, so they would have Email - Preferred, Email2, Email3, Email4, Email-Business, etc.


The other part is if we get a new email through BBNC say for an event or a gift and the data entry person get a new email as part of that process then they update the record while processing the gift or event.


When you say Preferred checkbox I assume you are referring to the Primary? box on the Email grid or is that something else?  We haven't bothered with that box since BBNC cares about emails by type.  

Patrick Edwards

Anne,


Thanks! Very helpful to hear your process.


Yes that error with the dates is a bit troubling


Yes I was referring to the Primary checkbox. You're doing that with email types so I can see why to simply ignore it.


So I would assume that you find most of your constituents are OK with receiving emails/newsletters at only one address? (or worst case that you can, by chosing one, sort of force them to be consistent?). I'm afraid I'm going to have to figure out a way to include a second list of emails for those folks that show activity on mutiple email addresses... "last used" just isn't going to cut it.