Email Data Entry

Kathryn Hardi 2

I am new to my organization and there are three ways in which email data has been entered that I am perplexed by why its  done that way, (and unfortunately there is no one who works here now who did the data entry) but I am new to Raiser's Edge and don't want to presume I know the right way of doing everything. I'm curious if more seasoned RE user's might have a bigger picture understanding of why things were done this way. Or if it was simply less than ideal data entry. 


When there is a married couple, one partner's emails are listed on their own record and on the spouse's record with a "Email Spouse" or "Email Spouse Work" 

So John Smith's emails tab looks like this:

Email: JohnS@gmail.com

Email Work:JohnS@work.com

Email Spouse Work: MaryS@gmail.com

Email Spouse Work: MaryS@work.com


And Mary's Email tab looks like this:

Email: MaryS@gmail.com

Email Work: MaryS@work.com

Email Spouse: JohnS@gmail.com

Email Spouse Work: JohnS@work.com


Is there a reason that I don't know about that makes it beneficial to record a wife's email address on her husband's record when it is already recorded on her own (and vice versa)?


Secondly email addresses that are not valid anymore are left on a record with the "Do not call" symbol checked next to it. 

Is there a reason to keep a non-working email on a record? 


And finially they have not used the primary email checkbox. I was tasked with gathering an email for every person we have, so we can send a bulk email announcement and because some records have multiple email addresses (and as I mentioned sometimes their spouses emails as well) I am having to manually go through the list in excel and take out all but one email so we aren't sending on record 4 emails. 


Thanks so much for your input!


 

JoAnn Strommen

If you have the primary email option, you must be on version 7.95.  A user who has gone through that update can probably explain the duplication of email better than I can guess.


But on why to keep non-working email, phones, addresses etc....  Provides a reference when you are given that email again by some source that it is not valid. Prevents it from being re-entered as a primary email when you get it again.


IMO

shani traum

We definitely keep old emails on the record, changing the type to former email and marking it inactive.  This way if someone says "Hey, I found this email for Mr. Smith" we can check and say "Yup, know about it, but it's an old one".


Also, even if it's not a former email, but they don't want us using it, we keep it and mark it as Do Not Contact - for the same reason.  If it's deleted, it may get re-entered onto the record and used, because there's no record of them having requested that we not use it.But if it's kept and flagged DNC, you can immediately see that we know about the address but have been asked not to use it.


We have multiple emails on some folks, but will keep them all, but mark the preferred as primary.


Shani

Kathryn Hardi 2

Thanks Shani and JoAnn, thats a great point about keeping historical data

Jen Claudy

Depending on when you moved from 7.93 to 7.95...or more accurately, whether you ever had 7.94...will affect the problem of true duplicates.  A lot was fixed in 7.95 that was a problem with 7.94.  But that's dealing more with real dupes.


We sometimes record Mary's email addresses on John's record if she has a Spouse Relationship Record but not her own Constituent Record.  This helps because our data is still messy in many places, including Relationships, so we only include email addresses from Constituent Records, not Relationships.


We use Online Express (OLX) which is integrated with RE (actually looks, for the most part, like part of RE).  This takes care of deduping emails and also tracks any unsubscribes that were submitted after we started using OLX.


Whatever cleanup you're doing in XLS, I would recommend you figure out how (and test it!) to get that data back into RE, or you may end up doing this all over again next time.


Blackbaud offers an EmailFinder service, which we will be using as soon as I find the time (ha!).  That may be helpful to you, and it's not as scary as I thought it might be.  The system finds potential email addresses that match names/usps addresses in your database and then sends a message to the email address giving them a chance to opt-out right then.  The data returned to you then is those who did not opt-out.  You can also request the data of those that did opt-out, which we would do and put in RE with either DNC (do not contact), Inactive, or (in our case, most likely) a Phone Type of "XeHome (unsubscribed)"...any Phone Type starting with X is excluded from any email lists we use.  But as Shani & JoAnn mentioned, this way when someone "finds" an email address for someone, we already know they've unsubscribed or it's known but marked invalid/do not contact/etc.

Jennifer McHale

Jen,


As someone who is looking at Online Express now ...

I'm glad to hear that de-duping is a possibility in Online Express. My understanding is that has not always been available in Blackbaud online products ...

Are you able to pull e-mails out of various places into one marketing message? Just thinking that what gets pulled in a Constituent Query - and maybe then a Relationship Query - aren't easily put together within Raiser's Edge. Might this create a reason why all those duplicates were created (although, I wouldn't want to pay by the email address for that arrangement!)?


Thanks!

Kathryn Hardi 2

Thanks for your thoughts. Email Finder sounds like a good resource. 


As far as moving forward and making sure I am able to pull out one email per constuient in RE, should I make sure that every record with and email or emails has a primary email address checked?

John Heizer

Jen Claudy:

Depending on when you moved from 7.93 to 7.95...or more accurately, whether you ever had 7.94...will affect the problem of true duplicates.  A lot was fixed in 7.95 that was a problem with 7.94.  But that's dealing more with real dupes.


We sometimes record Mary's email addresses on John's record if she has a Spouse Relationship Record but not her own Constituent Record.  This helps because our data is still messy in many places, including Relationships, so we only include email addresses from Constituent Records, not Relationships.


We use Online Express (OLX) which is integrated with RE (actually looks, for the most part, like part of RE).  This takes care of deduping emails and also tracks any unsubscribes that were submitted after we started using OLX.


Whatever cleanup you're doing in XLS, I would recommend you figure out how (and test it!) to get that data back into RE, or you may end up doing this all over again next time.


Blackbaud offers an EmailFinder service, which we will be using as soon as I find the time (ha!).  That may be helpful to you, and it's not as scary as I thought it might be.  The system finds potential email addresses that match names/usps addresses in your database and then sends a message to the email address giving them a chance to opt-out right then.  The data returned to you then is those who did not opt-out.  You can also request the data of those that did opt-out, which we would do and put in RE with either DNC (do not contact), Inactive, or (in our case, most likely) a Phone Type of "XeHome (unsubscribed)"...any Phone Type starting with X is excluded from any email lists we use.  But as Shani & JoAnn mentioned, this way when someone "finds" an email address for someone, we already know they've unsubscribed or it's known but marked invalid/do not contact/etc.

Warning about Email Finder.  The message that Blackbaud sends is opt-out.  Bulk email services like Constant Contact specifically require opt-in and I haven't found any service that will touch the Email Finder list to try to send an opt-in message.  Furthermore, the opt-in message that gets sent comes from an unrelated email server and looks like a phishing attempt (there's at least one thread here on the issue).  If you're using OLX then this may not be a big issue for you, but I know that we and several other orgs have gotten "burned" getting Email Finder data that is now essentially useless.

Daniel Bayer

Another warning about EmailFinder: We had a LOT of issues with it returning out-of-date email addresses, and found that it searches back 10 years to get data. A LOT has changed in the world of email in the past ten years. Plus, it's not always the person's "primary" email that is returned - quite a few of our new "EmailFinder" emails are actually that of parents/spouses, and NOT the actual constituents themselves. It's involved a LOT of clean-up work that I still haven't had time to really finish. It's certainly returned plenty of new/updated email addresses that we have been able to use, but everyone who's thinking of using it should be made aware of these issues.