Tracking eCards to verify they were sent

Maureen Joyce

Hello,

 

Does anyone know if there is a way to track whether or not an eCard was delivered/received? I know the donation form indicates a "Yes/No" in the "Donor Sent eCard" field, but I have had donors report cards not being received. I'm am particularly interested in eCards that are scheduled for future dates. The form indicates the card is sent on the date the donation was made, but is there an update somewhere when the actual eCard is sent and/or received?

 

Any tracking tips would be most helpful. Thanks!

Michael

Near as I can see, eCards lack the detailed stats reporting that can be found in the Email application. In the eCard application, you can run several eCard Reports but from the looks of it, they don't show any stats for things that happened after sending.

So, here are some suggestions that come to mind:

1: Don't worry about it

2: Rather than try tracking delivery, try tracking actions and opens. Place links you can track in the eCards (using a redirect URL that you can track via your web stats package, for example). To track opens, just put an image in your ecard that isn't used anywhere else (a 1x1 transparent GIF or PNG is helpful for this) and then place a watch on that image and count the number of hits and visits it gets. If you use DIFFERENCE pixels per ecard, you can track them all seperately. Opens is a bogus figure that people put WAY to much emphisis on because it's just not an accurate number... but it's very useful when watched in aggragate as a trend measure.

I suppose knowing if your ecards are landing in people's Junk Mail would be useful, but then if you find low click and open rates, it might indicate that problem too, but that's actually outside the scope of the Email application too (convio uses partners to determine inbox delivery). I think as a product enhancement, having bounce rates calculated in the ecard reports would be really useful, and would solve the issue your describing.

-mike

Maureen Joyce

Michael :

Near as I can see, eCards lack the detailed stats reporting that can be found in the Email application. In the eCard application, you can run several eCard Reports but from the looks of it, they don't show any stats for things that happened after sending.

So, here are some suggestions that come to mind:

1: Don't worry about it

2: Rather than try tracking delivery, try tracking actions and opens. Place links you can track in the eCards (using a redirect URL that you can track via your web stats package, for example). To track opens, just put an image in your ecard that isn't used anywhere else (a 1x1 transparent GIF or PNG is helpful for this) and then place a watch on that image and count the number of hits and visits it gets. If you use DIFFERENCE pixels per ecard, you can track them all seperately. Opens is a bogus figure that people put WAY to much emphisis on because it's just not an accurate number... but it's very useful when watched in aggragate as a trend measure.

I suppose knowing if your ecards are landing in people's Junk Mail would be useful, but then if you find low click and open rates, it might indicate that problem too, but that's actually outside the scope of the Email application too (convio uses partners to determine inbox delivery). I think as a product enhancement, having bounce rates calculated in the ecard reports would be really useful, and would solve the issue your describing.

-mike

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the tips. Ironically, I just got off the phone with another donor who said only one of the recipients she sent an eCard to received it, and also the donor did not receive the eCard and she checked the box to receive a copy - however she did receive her acknowledgement email at the same address. I guess I'm mostly looking for a way to follow up on these concerns and not just tell donors "I don't know what happened". I feel I should have some way of following up and explaining why eCards are not being delivered - especially since a donation was made with the intent of having an eCard notification sent out. In this particular case, she had eleven recipient emails and the only one that reported receiving the eCard was in the middle of the list.

Anyway, in follow up to your suggestion - would imbedding the transparent image in the eCard allow me to track each instance of the card? So would I know that the card sent by donor ABC is the one that was opened, and not just that the "flower card" was opened three times on a particular day?

Thanks again for your help. I'm also wondering if anyone else is getting feedback from their donors that eCards are not being received.

Michael

Maureen Joyce:

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the tips. Ironically, I just got off the phone with another donor who said only one of the recipients she sent an eCard to received it, and also the donor did not receive the eCard and she checked the box to receive a copy - however she did receive her acknowledgement email at the same address. I guess I'm mostly looking for a way to follow up on these concerns and not just tell donors "I don't know what happened". I feel I should have some way of following up and explaining why eCards are not being delivered - especially since a donation was made with the intent of having an eCard notification sent out. In this particular case, she had eleven recipient emails and the only one that reported receiving the eCard was in the middle of the list.

Anyway, in follow up to your suggestion - would imbedding the transparent image in the eCard allow me to track each instance of the card? So would I know that the card sent by donor ABC is the one that was opened, and not just that the "flower card" was opened three times on a particular day?

Thanks again for your help. I'm also wondering if anyone else is getting feedback from their donors that eCards are not being received.

Well, if the card wasn't in their Junk Mail box and they don't use a challenge-response style filter service (click here to verifiy your a human before we'll deliver your email, etc), then I'd say the only recourse you have is to follow up with Convio support. My guess is that it was a filter they have in place that either blackholed your email, or dropped in into their junk folders.

On the image, no, I don't think you can peg individual e-cards to donors within the stationary. Maybe using some sort of E/S-Tag combination I'm not aware of, but if I had to bet, I'd say you can't really do it at that level of granularity.

Walter Winfield

Unless I'm misunderstanding something (which is always a possibility), the eCard reporting doesn't report on eCards sent using a donation form - it only reports on eCards sent using an eCard Campaign. I have a donation form set up for eCards and there's lots of donor activity but no corresponding activity shows up in eCard reports. I raise this, because along with others in this thread, I'm getting calls/emails from donors stating things such as:

"I did not get my copy, and I should have heard from the 8 recipients that they'd gotten theirs."

I don't see any other reporting options outside of eCards to help inform my response to the donor.

Walter

Maureen Joyce

Walter Winfield:

Unless I'm misunderstanding something (which is always a possibility), the eCard reporting doesn't report on eCards sent using a donation form - it only reports on eCards sent using an eCard Campaign. I have a donation form set up for eCards and there's lots of donor activity but no corresponding activity shows up in eCard reports. I raise this, because along with others in this thread, I'm getting calls/emails from donors stating things such as:

"I did not get my copy, and I should have heard from the 8 recipients that they'd gotten theirs."

I don't see any other reporting options outside of eCards to help inform my response to the donor.

Walter

I followed up with Convio support on this issue - here is what they said:

I apologize that Convio currently does not have the same tracking on Ecards as we do on Email messages. Currently Ecards are not on the same set of servers as our regular Email messages. This being said, we do make an entry in a log of when Ecards are sent. For both the provided examples, we do have a record of those Ecards being sent; however, as I mentioned we have no method to track it once it leaves the Convio servers. I will say that the scheduled Ecards are usually sent and received without issue during the week, but have shown a tendency to not be received when sent on the weekends. This is an area of concern and resolutions are being discussed by our engineering group. I apologize for any inconvenience.+ +

I replied to ask if scheduled eCards are always sent at the same time - which may be something to note on the donation form so that donors know to schedule the card a day early if it will not be delivered until the evening. In both of the examples I provided in my support ticket, the eCards were scheduled for a Saturday.

I will post their next response to keep everyone in the loop.