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Blackbaud CRM Higher Education Product Advisory Group (Higher Ed PAG)

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BBCRM - Email Composer

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Elliot FalvertMartin
Elliot FalvertMartin ✭
Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
in High Education Program Advisory Group (HE PAG)
Hello All,


I was wondering if anyone had looked into or had already implemented customisations around the email composer tool within the marketing and communications area. Specifically, bringing in a 3rd party tool to build an email and then drop the code/completed email within an ‘Email’ within CRM. All other steps and processes would then continue to utilise BBCRM.

Our users continually report they aren’t happy with the current email composer tool and subsequently are looking at using 3rd party tools to build emails instead. They prefer email building steps, look and behaviour of MailChimp and EmailJet.


Obviously we would like all users to stick with BBCRM however if the current composer can’t fit their needs then we would need to look to support it in any way we can.
I could have been mistaken but I was told a presentation happened during a HEPAG meeting where a participant had managed to customise this area to allow an external email composer tool to drop the completed message directly within the email builder.

If possible can anyone answer the following?
  • A link to previous HEPAG minutes so I can search through previous presentations (I can’t seem to find them).
  • If you have had/or looking at a customisation in this area, would you be willing to talk to me about how it works?
I’m aware that Blackbaud is currently in development of a new email composer however it’s no way near being ready for BBCRM. I’m also aware you can take raw code out of mailchimp/stripo (other email providers that provide HTML code) and drop within the email composer tool to get the same effect, this has been suggested to users but still not ideal.

Any information you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Best wishes,

Elliot Falvert-Martin

University of Oxford

 

Comments

  • Rick Root 2
    Rick Root 2 ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Elliot,


    I know UGA implemented the Bee Editor into an external platform that integrated with CRM ...

    https://beefree.io/


    I have *mostly* finished my Bee implementation into CRM in a more native fashion.  I should be finishing it up soon and would be willing to share my code.


    I was able to get it working with merge tags and everything.


    We are using the Bee Plugin Startup Edition but it can definitely be done with the free version too.


    Rick

    UNC-CH

     
  • Elliot FalvertMartin
    Elliot FalvertMartin ✭
    Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    Hey Rick,


    Thank you for responding, Bee Implementation sounds great! I appreciate you’re not fully integrated yet, however once that’s done would love to see how it looks (screenshots etc if that’s easier).


    From a user's journey with the Bee Implementation, can I just check the intended process?

    A user would navigate to the marketing and communications area and select email marketing, fill in the export definition and then when the email composer loads, it utilizes the bee email composer instead of the BBCRM one? They would use the Bee interface to build their email using the functionality providing by Bee, once edited and saved, send out via Marketing Effort/Events Area?

    Thanks in advance for any insight you can give.

    Elliot
  • Rick Root 2
    Rick Root 2 ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Elliot,


    Basically, I built a custom Edit Direct Marketing Email form.  I changed the HTML Content from an HTML editor part to a plain text area, and I put it on a separate tab from the general email information.  Then, I added a third tab that contained a code table field which I call Bee Library - this is technically used tot pass a "user" to the Bee Plugin Editor but really it just identifies which Amazon S3 library to use for image storage.  The third tab also contains a text area field which holds the JSON output of the Bee Editor.  The JSON is what actually drives the Bee Editor, so when you want to edit an existing email in the Bee Editor, you have to pass the JSON to it, not the HTML.


    This form obviously needed a custom UI Model with some javascript to open the Bee Editor and pass the appropriate fields to it.


    The Bee Editor itself is implemented as a plain HTML page placed in the vroot/browser/htmlforms/custom/bee folder, with some additional javascript that, when the user chooses to save their email, sends both the HTML and JSON back to the calling Edit form.


    Additional pieces were also required - in order to make merge tags work, I wrote a custom handler deployed to BBIS that would provide a list of merge tags to the Bee Editor.  The save routine then converted those merge tags to appropriate html <img> tags that the out of the box editor would normally produce.


    What I haven't really done yet is come up with a way to store and re-use templates.  It would be easy enough, I just haven't had time yet.  Probably a button on the custom edit form that would pop up a window showing email template thumbnails and when one was chosen, would copy in the JSON and HTML.... then the Bee Editor could be launched.


    Rick

     
  • Elliot FalvertMartin
    Elliot FalvertMartin ✭
    Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    Good morning Rick,


    Thank you for taking the time to detail this out and share how it's achieved, it's really helpful!


    Awesome job for figuring this out and for building it, would love to see what you've achieved when it's ready :) 


    All the best,


    Elliot 


     

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