white house deliverability failure

Bev Stanton

I see the white house has 100% failure rate as far as deliverability, and users who submit messages are being diverted to a "copy and paste this text and submit at this link" notification.


Does anyone know why this is happening and do we know if blackbaud is working to resolve this issue? 

Sally Heaven

Hi Bev - a few weeks ago the White House started requiring phone number on their forms. Does your current alert make phone number a required field? If not, then changing that setting should fix the problem. 

Caroline Stuart-Freas

Here is the Knowledge Base article about it: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/97561 

Bev Stanton

Sally here is what the user sees after taking action on this alert:

https://secure.npca.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1561


we have the phone number required. the deliverability status on the WH alerts is showing 100% failure. I just wanted to flag this and let me know if there is something else we should be doing. Never a dull moment!





 

Liz Pomper

We opened a case on this on 2/2, and the form had been failing for a couple of days before that. We do have phone number required. Latest case update on 2/4:

I am still working with the Data team on this to see what alternatives or changes may be available to the targets webform. Most of the errors seem to be generating a similar error, and a portion seem to be getting through. When I reviewed deliveries for the last 7 days for this alert 7 successes and 27 failures. Documentation on this error mentions retries may be successful with this type, but not sure if you have attempted retries already from the delivery report. 

I have provided additional examples to the data team around the particular responses users are submitting that are generating the errors. I will continue to provide updates on the findings. 

Sally Heaven

The plot thickens if you have phone number required! I don't know if this is happening for everyone - others, feel free to chime in. Did you put this into Support yet, Bev?

Bev Stanton

Sally i will file a support ticket! Liz thank you for letting us know it is not just us!!!

Caroline Stuart-Freas

Please do update the case - I'd be interested in seeing what happens via the support case! 


Thanks!

Bev Stanton

Support got back to me! i think this is resolved. Deliverability is up from 100% failure to 84% and I was able to sign our petition without being sent to the screen to resubmit. Thank you everyone!

Bev Stanton

I hear we are back at 100% undeliverable again. : ( 


At least users are not being sent to the webform to copy and paste. Our advocacy manager is going to retry deliveries today.

Andrew Wilcox

Just a quick update: Over the last couple weeks we have been working to restore the deliverability to the POTUS webform. Unfortunately, these issues were caused when the whitehouse staff made a number of changes, including deprecating the API form which allowed us to deliver at greater than 98% success. We are continuing to troubleshoot the new (old) webform and last week we made some changes which allowed us to see some level of success. We are revisiting those changes and will put additional measures in place this week which we hope will yield better results.


In short, stay tuned this week, we should see an increase in deliverablity. Long term, we are attempting to engage the whitehouse staff to determine what can be done to restore the previous webform.

Bev Stanton

Andrew thank you for this explanation! has there been any progress yet? We appreciate all your efforts!

Andrew Wilcox

Hi Bev-


We were able to correctly map to the old form and in recent weeks you should see that deliverability to the POTUS webform has returned to normal rates. It's important to note that you'll see the expected success rates if using the "alert delivery report" which is specific to your alert and your site data. Currently, there is a known issue (Bug 70724) where the Advanced Targeting feature (and associated data) is displaying 100% failure to the POTUS (for example: if you are using the "Delivery Statistics" report with the "Beta" tag or viewing the pop-up warning in the target selector). This data is incorrectly being aggregated across all sites due to a missing status requirement. This issue will be resolved in the upcoming 15.4 LO release. For more info on specific dates for that release check out the KB here and for details on the contents keep an eye out for the updated release notes.

Liz Pomper

I'm having 100% delivery failure on an alert targeting President Obama that we launched yesterday (http://www.audubonaction.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=2265). I didn't initially include phone number to see if it would work, and added it as a required field at 3:30 p.m. ET yesterday (7/21). We're still seeing 100% failure on messages delivered after that time.

Liz Pomper

I got this response from support, which seems not to jive with the previous messages on this thread:


Obama changed his form at the beginning of the year and it is not as reliable as the previous one. In general the best course of action for any Advocacy deliverability problems would be to:

 

1. Set phone to be required (which you did) 2. Set the messages to rollover to fax/email 3. Retry failures

 

Not all targets can be consistently delivered to, so the combination of delivery methods and retries will allow for some messages to get delivered one way or the other.