New Changes for TeamRaiser Participant and Coaching Emails to Support Improved Email Deliverability

Chris Kauffman

Earlier in the year, the Luminate Online team added funtionality to change the behavior of Tell-A-Friend and participant center (PC2 and Participant Center Classic) emails. with this change the SDP NOTIF_FROM became the "from" email address and the individual's (participant's) personal email address was used for "reply-to."

 

With the 14.8 release, we have expanded the use of the SDP NOTIF_FROM to coaching emails and added more control for centers and specific TeamRaiser events. Now Luminate Online and TeamRaiser allows you to set the Sender Email (for PC2 and coaching emails) in three ways:

 

1. At the site level in the SDP Notif_from
2. At the center level (overrides the SDP)
3. At the TeamRaiser event level (overrides the center setting and/or the SDP)

 (Email campaigns now allows you to set From and Reply-to separately.)

 

The EDP for #3 can be set in the TeamRaiser Advanced Options, Define Event Options under "Sender Email."

 

Some background...

 

In the past few months, Blackbaud has made a number of changes to Luminate Online and TeamRaiser's email capabilities to support Yahoo's implementation of DMARC (I'll post a separate article with background on DMARC). DMARC is honored by all of the major email services, so Yahoo's "DMARC reject" policy impacted emails across the Internet.

 

In a nutshell, DMARC requires that emails are only sent from a domain that your orgnization controls. In other words, the “From” address on all emails must be @npo.org or @convio.net or some other domain that you control or one of your approved vendors controls. “Reply-to” can be any value and does not impact DMARC at this time.

 

A similar problem (using technologies other than DMARC) existed on some corporate email systems for many years. These corporate systems would reject incoming emails with their corporate domain, if the email was not sent by a the corporations email servers. Yahoo’s switch to a “DMARC Reject” policy signaled a major change in email deliverability and impacted mass numbers of participants, donors and their supporters.

 

Blackbaud believes that these changes will improve overall email deliverability for Yahoo and other email systems.