Your organization takes over an event from someone else. How do you add the outside contacts to your list?

Jori Taylor · July 2014

This post is inspired by a recent question from a new client and it brings up a great discussion about when it's ok to import contacts into Luminate/Constituent360 from an outside source.

The Situation

My client is essentially taking over a recreational ride from a local cycling club, which has been going strong for 17 years. Historically, this event has NOT been a fundraising event and participants did NOT fundraise, although donations were accepted from time to time for local charities. The cycling club has their own website and database.

The Question

Can we/should we/how do we solicit these previous riders. 17 years of data is a long history and not one you want to leave behind.

The Good News

The cycling club has already been including content about the upcoming October event in its monthly enewsletter with a link to my client's event registration page.

The Great News

The cycling club has given my client permission to use their contacts AND to email them directly about the event. Yes! Let's do this...but be smart about it.

The Proposed Solution

The main theme is that you need to be careful and treat these contacts with care so you don't lose too many OR mess too much with your spam ratings and email deliverability. The worst thing you can do is grab the list and start pounding them with messages.

Make sure the cycling club continues sending information about the event in their monthly enewsletters with a link to your organization's event registration page. Awesome! Past participants for whom you don't currently have an email address already have an avenue to register for this year. And this ultimately means they become your contact.
Request that the cycling club send a special message to their list informing them they’ll start to receive messages from your organization. The intention of this message is to make it less of a surprise when they receive your messages and hopefully reduces the initial unsubscribe rate. The cycling club has the relationship with the contact, not you. Not yet.
Get the list of contacts from the cycling club. Make sure it looks clean – remove bad email addresses, remove columns you don’t need. Upload the list into the Luminate/Consitutuent360 database, adding these contacts to their own group (use group upload), something like “[Name of Cycling Club] Contacts.” This way they get added to your general housefile, BUT you’ll also have a group you can target or suppress. This is key.
Consider sending one or two introductory emails in July/August (event is in October) to this list to clean it up even more by allowing time for those contacts who do not wish to receive the organization's emails to unsubscribe.
Consider suppressing this list from any other communications for the time being, like your enewsletter or appeal messages, etc. Once YOU establish a relationship with the contact as either a registered participant or event donor, you can begin messaging them after the event -- releasing them into your normal stream of communication.
Once the introductory messages have been sent, start sending event specific messages (recruitment/coaching) the first part of September.

This plan is intended to protect the organization as much as possible from spam hits and begin a healthy engagement that starts off right.

What do you think?

Juliana Baioni · January 2019

What is the best format to import those addresses into LO? Do they need to be in an Excel spreadsheet, a CSV, or something else?

Colleen Gutierrez · January 2019

Hi Juliana - The Standard Constituent Import can upload the contact information. See Standard Constituent Import.

A sample CSV is available in step 1 here.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Jeremy Reynolds · January 2019

Jori Taylor:

The main theme is that you need to be careful and treat these contacts with care so you don't lose too many OR mess too much with your spam ratings and email deliverability. The worst thing you can do is grab the list and start pounding them with messages.

This SO MUCH.

Hopefully, the client can come to understand understand that it's actually a good thing when people to say, "don't contact me." You really only want people who will engage...email service providers fight spam so aggressively that they react to low open rates. Even a recipient that just ignores you can still hurt the cause, and a couple of people hitting the spam button can hurt your domain rep. Both have the same effect: completely unrelated emails stop showing up in recipients' inboxes.

In this new world, the quality of your list is so much more important than quantity. If you give me the choice between 100 users that are willing to open, vs. 10 users who will reliably open/click/fundraise/donate, I will always take the later.

To that end, consider going so far as to use LO's interests and C360 groups to create a pseudo double opt-in, and then limit future emails to people who verify themselves. The trick is to use special links to update user settings. I haven't actually done this particular use case, but here's the theoretical steps:

Create an LO interest and/or C360 group. The default for all users is to not be included.
Create an LO survey, containing an email field, checkbox, and submit button.
- Email field set through the URL if possible. The incoming link should include &autologin=TRUE and could use S1 to pull primary email and pre-fill the form.
- Add an HTML caption that uses a conditional to check both URL & S1 tags for an address, and then includes css styles to hide the email field if the address is known.
- Checkbox can be either an interest update field, or you could use a normal form element and set it to update C360 group membership. Not sure which is better.
Talk on the phone with someone? Go into admin and manually edit the user record to add them to the target group and/or update the "opt-in" email interest.
Collect a bunch of sign-ups at an event? Use a CSV import, including columns for the group membership and/or interest opt-ins.

I'm kinda torn on whether it's best to send someone to that form, or use the form submission URL to send them straight to a success page. Making users check a checkbox will definitely give you better lists, but also makes it more likely to lose interested users.

Your organization takes over an event from someone else. How do you add the outside contacts to your list?

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