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Karen Borneman · October 2015

I need to update my emails. Currently I have email and email 2 as my phone types but noticed with the updated RE version (7.94) I can use the same phone type twice. Should I change my email 2 to just email so they will all be the same then do the update? Any thoughts?

John Heizer · October 2015

Is your goal to update existing email addresses that might have changed, or to get new email addresses for Constituents where you don't have an email address at all?

If you're trying to get email addresses for existing Constituents where you don't have an existing email address and you use a bulk email service like Constant Contact you need to be aware that the new email addresses have almost zero value because CC (and all other such services) will not let you use those addresses until the recipient specifically opts in. There's a Catch-22 because you can't contact them via email to ask them to opt in, and Blackbaud (as part of the normal service of collecting and verifying the addresses for you) only asks them to opt out, and even that message they send is problematic (looks like a phishing attempt).

I assume that if you're using a Blackbaud product like NetCommunity for your email that this restriction doesn't apply.

Check the threads below for earlier conversations about some of the problems:

https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/147/20747?post_id=67610#p67610

https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/147/16704?post_id=54161#p54161

Jen Claudy · October 2015

If you use OLX, I wouldn't. A record with 2 email addresses both with the same Phone Type will have 2 messages sent, but when you push the data from OLX to RE and the Appeal tags are created, there will only be one on the record (and I'm not sure which email address it will show). It took me a long while to figure out what was happening, and I think it was an unintended consequence of 7.94 that no one realized would happen. What this meant for us is that our Marketing person would look at the totals in the OLX honeycomb report, and then I would report on the totals from an Appeals report, and they wouldn't match. (This situation was only part of the problem...we also have a lot of dupes and situations where the same email was on the ex-husband's and ex-wife's records.)

If you don't use OLX, and decide to combine the two, I would use that Primary checkbox so that, should something change in the future, you can more easily revert back to your current system.

If you don't have a good reason to do it, I wouldn't do it.

Bradley Henry · October 2015

We do not allow more than one email of a specific type (with one exception I will explain bellow)

Our database has 5 specific email types.

E-mail Preferred

E-mail Alternate

E-mail Personal

E-mail Business

E-mail Former

All communications are sent to the E-mail Preferred (if you are using the Primary checkbox always check this email).

If we get a new email but are not told that the old email is invalid we make the old email Alternate and the new one Preferred.

The Personal and Business email types are there to store additional emails that may have been picked up in signature blocks or out of office replys with an alternate contact.

If we are notified that an email address is no longer valid or we receive a hard bounce from a communication we make that email address E-mail Former and tick the Inactive box, this hides the email but keeps it on record as a reference. For this reason it is the only email type that we allow to have more than one recorded email in.

Hope this helps,

Bradley.

Karen Borneman · October 2015

I am using the data health center to update my existing emails and constituents that currently do not have one listed. I did change the title from email and email 2 to preferred email and alternative email in an attempt not to confuse my system.

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