Distributing Luminate access across departments

Craig,

We have many organizations that utilize their Luminate email tool this way. The key is determining how much access or ability you need to limit or grant to the other teams. You may want to allow another team the ability to create emails but request you to send them. This ensures that multiple teams are not sending a single constituent multiple emails in one day. Or you can setup security categories and groups so another team can only email certain contacts in certain groups. 

If you can share what kind of other teams you have interested and who they would be emailing I can help you out with a little more detail in how you could do the setup.

Kent

Craig Ziskin:

Thanks for replying Kent.  There's two types of things that we might want to consider distributing. One is regularly scheduled mailings such as newsletters.  Another is providing data and reports.  On the first one, my concern is that if we decentralize, then other departments may modify formats that are predefined or mail to constituents that from a centralized perspective we might not want them to.

 

As far as reporting, I might want to enable people to generate data whenever they want, but don't want to feel we have to hand-hold them all the time, as well as limit what data or reports they can see and limit them from other activities.

 

Craig

With both of these you can setup sub-admin categories with permissions to limit capabilities. Here is a blog I did where I listed all of the admin permissions back when I wrote the blog last fall: http://community.convio.com/t5/Community-Manager-Blog/Listing-of-Luminate-Online-Permissions/ba-p/54478

You can setup permissions that allow someone in a permission group to create or modify conten for a message body or the  stationary. You can even set these up so someone can create an email but they can't send it. 

Another step you can take is setting up permission groups and then set email campaigns so only members of certain groups can update these. You can then setup built-in target lists that are the only people the group can send to. 

I'm not sure which method would work best for you. Honestly the easiest way is to setup policies and instruct the other team to follow the policies or else you will remove capabilities. Then you don't have to restrict as much. However with many large orgs this just isn't enough. These orgs often really get specific with their setup by setting specific groups to only have very limited capabilities. I would recommend getting started with a policies sheet and setup very specific groups for these people to be in and give them permissions to work only in the campaigns that you give them access to. Then I would work with these teams to build out query-built groups for them that they would use. This should get them setup in the tool itself. In the policies you may want to take this time to introduce a public email calendar where people can list days and times they plan to send their email. Then someone will need to monitor that calendar.

Like I said before, it's a challenge to know how well you can trust anyone on another team that you don't directly control. So you may give them a month or two with very strict oversight and then loosen the oversight over time. 

When you get ready to setup the permissions I am happy to help you tweak them. But first I would get everything on paper: who needs to create emails, who needs to send them, what groups do each team need to have built, and who is going to be the "owner" of all of the email communication. I think this will help you realize what the task is you have in front of you to build in your Luminate tool.

Hope this helps.

Kent