Bounced emails

Tammy Watson · January 2017

How do you handle bounced emails in The Raiser's Edge?

Alan French · January 2017

We mark them as Do Not Contact, and if there's an action associated with the communication that we were trying to send, e.g. a newsletter, I'll put an attribute on it to say that it bounced. It's really easy to exclude emails marked DNC from our exports, so I don't end up repeatedly mailing the same dead email address. Once we upgrade from 7.93 I'll probably use Inactive rather than DNC, and I'd be tempted to add a short note to the comments field.

We don't delete bounced email addresses for several reasons, one of the main ones being that I'm not always convinced that the "hard bounces" really are hard bounces, as we occasionally get them for managed constituents where we know we've been corresponding recently using that email. If someone were to register for an event or something with the same email address further down the line, it's helpful to still have that email address on file to match them up with their constituent record.

Jen Claudy · January 2017

Not sure exactly what you're asking, and the answer somewhat depends on what product you use to send emails.

We have Online Express, which is a Blackbaud product integrated into RE. It handles bounces and unsubscribes for us, as far as not sending to those who have unsubscribed or to addresses with hard bounces...same as most products (Constant Contact, Vertical Response, MailChimp, etc.). For ease of use in the database (because staff may grab an email address from there for a regular email to that individual) and to keep a history of emails, I change the Phone Type. Here is a screenshot of the Phone Types in my RE database:

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If applicable, I might also add a Comment. I don't care for the DNC or Inactive options, because they aren't tied directly to the Phone Fields...as shown in the second screenshot below. This can make it difficult to find Phones marked Inactive/DNC or Constituents with/without a Phone marked as Inactive/DNC.

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Tammy Watson · January 2017

We export reports from The Raiser's Edge and upload our email addresses into Constant Contact. We're are not sure if we should delete the emails from The Raiser's Edge if they are considered bounced emails in Constant Contact.

Jen Claudy · January 2017

When we used Constant Contact and I was trying to keep everything in sync, I stored the RE ConstID in Constant Contact to facilitate matching up records. I think I would still be inclined to update RE by changing the Phone Type or adding a Phone Comment, for one big reason (beyond the information being available in RE to your fundraisers): if you ever switch from Constant Contact to another provider (particularly if it's Blackbaud), your data being in sync and cleaned will help. If an email address is marked by CC as bounced (or more importantly as unsubscribed), you delete it altogether from RE, somewhere along the line someone adds it back to RE because they don't know it's no longer valid, you change vendors and upload "valid" email addresses from CC and also from RE (thinking they may be new and were never added to CC), now you are once again emailing invalid addresses (and addresses that have been unsubscribed, which is a bigger problem).

Also, if the choice is between deleting the email from RE altogether or changing the Phone Type (or marking as either DNC or Inactive), I think the time spent will be the same. That said, I would definitely just mark them rather than delete them.

shani traum · January 2017

We don't delete old emails, because then they may just get re-entered down the road by someone who thinks they're new.

We mark bouced emails as former and inactive with a note as to why that occurred..."Email suchandsuch marked inactive as a bounce occured after a Constant Contact email blast"

That way if that address pops up on radar again, we know it's a bad one.

Shani

Anne Boudreau · January 2017

Tammy Watson:

How do you handle bounced emails in The Raiser's Edge?

We have an attribute of Email Bounceback, with a table that has choices of Bounced Back Once and Email Removed. (We originally allowed two bounces before removal and had a choice of Bounced Back Twice, but changed that recently.) The comments field is used to record the email address in question. Now that we are on version 7.95, we could just store all the bounced emails as "inactive" on the Bio 1 tab, but the old system works well for us.

Bounced emails

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