Creating an e-Card thank you for donors

Taylor Shanklin

Got a great question and wanted to share it in Community.

*Question*

e-card to thank our donors. Please let us know if this is something Convio could set up as an auto responder reply when someone makes an online donation. If so, what file format would our graphics dept. need to provide you with?

*Answer*

I really like this idea of sending an eCard as a thank you after someone makes a gift.  There are a couple of ways you could go about doing this.  It depends on if you want the donor to get the eCard as an automated message or as an additional email communication:

1. If you want the eCard to be automatically sent upon giving a donation, you could create a new stationery that has this new eCard style and use that stationery for your donation autoresponders.  The autoresponder stationery we set up for you as part of the Go! program is typically pretty simple and includes your branding up at the top with a link to your website in the footer. That stationery is the one we set up for you during configuration of your site.  However, you could develope a new stationery and update the autoresponders to use this new eCards styled stationery.   This is not something that our production team has the resources to do as an extra project.  However, you have full access to create stationeries and is really not too difficult using the WYSIWYG.  You can even get started by copying the "basic eCard" stationery we have already created for you and updating it it with your new graphic.  Check out the eCards & stationery training video that is available on the Customer Center: http://convio.na4.acrobat.com/p11255016/

2. You could set up an email message and stationery for this eCard that is sent out to your donors.  Since your Convio Go! donation campaign is set up to place donors into the "Convio Go! Donation Campaign" group, it will be very easy to set up that group as your target audience for your email.  You may even want to set up the email as a recurring email that goes out every week or every other week to recent donors.  If you'd like to do that, then you could set up a query that looks at the last transaction date and creates a group based off of transaction date....This is what we went over in office hours this week. :-).  These are all things that you have access to set up.  For query, just be sure to take the query training (http://convio.na4.acrobat.com/p73759637/) and let me know so we can make sure you have access to that.  If you would like to go with this route and want our team to build out the email, we can do that.  We would just count the email as your 1-per month email communication submission.

In terms of file format for the eCard image, you'll want to create a .jpg that is optimized for web viewing. Check out http://www.webresizer.com/ for a very easy way to resize and optimize your images for the web.  There are a couple of different layouts (vertical and horizontal) you could do for the eCard.  We actually have guides you could download that would help you out in this area.  Check out our eCard Horizontal and eCard Vertical guides in our documents section of Community: http://community.customer.convio.com/community/velocity?view=documents.  Those contain all of the specs you'll need for your eCard images that work in our templates.  And, if you choose to have our team build this as your monthly communication, you'll want to submit the guide.  So, it's good to go ahead and download them and have them on hand.

Let us know if one of these options works with what you had in mind and if you have any more questions post back!

Taylor