The queue for Giving Tuesday and EOY Campaign

As soon as you can! It's first-come.



You can put your email content in a reusable pagebuilder page, so you can make changes without canceling your delivery. However, any links you have in that reusable content will not be reported/trackable by the email center without some tricks.



Here's a sort of long-winded post about how to have trackable links in your reusable...

https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/1/595?post_id=595#p595



The downside is that you have to define the URLs for your links in the actual email message, not in that reusable. So you'll need to have those final before you schedule.

Hi All,



I'm chiming in here to filter this question up again-- are there any specific guidelines to follow when scheduling or sending emails during year-end, due to the high volume of emails going through the BB / Luminate servers at that time? I've heard of past years where emails scheduled for 12/31 weren't delivered until 1/1, etc.



Thanks!

Luminate Online e-mails work basically like a deli line. Go get your ticket(schedule an e-mail) and wait til they call your number. So if you have ticket number 1(first scheduled e-mail for that day in Luminate Online), you are going first. If you get ticket 35(35th scheduled e-mail), your e-mail will not process until the other 34 e-mails in front of you have been sent.



Blackbaud has been making improvements to e-mail hardware and softwarethis entire year to make the 2015 end-of-year e-mail deliverability faster and more reliable. Last year there were issues for December 31 sends and that is why all the improvements came this year. Soon we will see if they work.



Like others have already said in this post, schedule them early(I schedule all our sends first or second week of November). You do not need to approve them and set up delivery, but at least create the e-mail as a draft and put a tentative schedule date in. This is your deli line ticket(tentative schedule date). Now if you change that date, you go to the end of the line, but most of us know the days we are sending for year-end, so that shouldn't be an issue.



Thanks,



Phil

We've been on the platform 7 years and every single year there have been delays with getting emails out.  They say it will be different this year. I suggest for the last day of the year you send your email 3 to 4 hours before when you actually want it to go out.  This partially worked for us last year, but we still didn't get a lot of our emails out later than we wanted.

Thanks for chiming in Andrew. This is definitely different than what I have been told as of last year. We were definitely told it was like a deli line and scheduling the tentative send date gave us a place in line. I did this last year and did not have the unpleasant experience our e-mails not being delivered on time, like so many other Luminate clients did.



So when did this change to this format? As an aside to this, I feel that there are constantly e-mail changes that occur with zero warning to us clients. A prime example is the removal of the plain-text e-mail option, which was communicated in a two line blurb in a release note, but that is a conversation for another day.



Additionally, this comment "While scheduling your message as far in advance as possible is definitely a best practice it does not, necessarily, give you preference over other clients or other sends." is troublesome to say the least. This means that even though we get our e-mails scheduled early, it really doesn't matter. Kind of defeats the purpose of scheduling them early since we could get pushed out of the way by another Luminate client that schedules their send later.  Or on the flip side, it could work in our favor if we scheduled late and in the Luminate magic scheduling factors, our client site has something about it that makes us jump the line of those that scheduled early. 



Looking forward to heaing your thoughts on this.



Thanks,



Phil

Great points and some great feedback, I'll try and be short with my response but please know that if you (or anyone) want to discuss anything in detail you can message me directly and I'm happy to dive in further. First, I can't speak to what information was passed on last year but if you forward me any of this communication I'll follow up directly and make sure that the information is correct if it's on any public facing resource. Second, we have to keep in mind that the email platform (compared to last year) is significantly different from a backend/infrastructure perspective. Any information provided to you last year would have been based on the old system (check out the Email Enhancement FAQ for high level review of the improvements for this year).



Again, it is absolutely true that scheduling your email early puts you at the front of the line compared to those messages that are scheduled later on your own site. However, it does not directly impact when your messages will process in relation to any other client. I would also like to reiterate that your position in your site's line/queue is not set until you have actually scheduled your message.



Scheduling your emails in advance has a number of added benefits and, ultimately, creates the optimum opportunity for success during EOY. I would actually like to do away with the deli line metaphor in favor of a better one that better represents how the system actually works; think of it more as a grocery store checkout. There are multiple lines, one for every client site, and scheduling early (or late) will determine your position. Rather than one deli counter though, Luminate Online has multiple checkout stations all meant to handle these lines. As the number of lines grows we can open up more checkout stations to account for the increasing volume, making sure that everyone can check out without experiencing long wait times. Scheduling your emails has the added benefit that it allows us to forecast when and where these lines will form so that we can make sure that the proper resources (check out counters) are open and ready. To round off that metaphor, our work over the last year has been to ensure that our "check out stations" have the latest and greatest technology, the staff is properly trained, and processes are in place to handle any tricky situations. The deli line is in the past, this year we are confident that your experience (along with processing times) will improve significantly. You should have already experienced these improvements over the last couple months, including on Giving Tuesday.