Donation Tracker Constant Contact Integration

Cascade Data Solutions is pleased to announce that Donation Tracker is now integrated with Constant Contact®. With this new integration, you will be able to easily sync email addresses in Donation Tracker with email addresses in Constant Contact. All without having to perform the laborious process of exporting out of one product and manually importing into the other. Our new Constant Contact integration is included with Donation Tracker and is not an optional module. Meaning, you will be able to upgrade your current version of Donation Tracker to the newest version, with the integration, at no cost if you are currently covered under support and maintenance. Annual support and maintenance includes; unlimited training and technical support, report modifications and custom reports, as well as upgrades and updates. What is Constant Contact? Constant Contact®, Inc. helps small businesses, associations, and nonprofits connect with their customers, clients, and members. Launched in 1998, Constant Contact champions the needs of small organizations and provides them with an easy and affordable way to build successful, lasting customer relationships. What is Email Marketing? Email marketing helps you keep customers and prospects coming back—by using attractive, professional-looking email communications to stay in regular touch with them and build strong customer relationships. It's better and more effective than regular email. How much does it cost to use the Constant Contact Service? Absolutely nothing. United Way Worldwide joined Constant Contact’s Cares4Kids Program, making local United Ways eligible to use Constant Contact’s email services for free. To learn more about this please visit here. This document will explain and give details about the features that are now available in Donation Tracker that can help you with your Constant Contact E-Mail marketing efforts.

*Constant Contact is a registered trademark and service mark of Constant Contact, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

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Section I. – Setting Up Constant Contact Integration .......................................................... - 2 - 

A. System Setup ................................................................................................................................. - 2 - 

B. Security Setup ................................................................................................................................ - 3 - 

Section II. – Syncing ................................................................................................................ - 4 - 

A. Constant Contact Integration and Syncing ................................................................................. - 4 - 

B. Managing Email Lists .................................................................................................................... - 5 - 

C. Syncing Records with Constant Contact ..................................................................................... - 7 - 

Section III. – Assigning E-Mail Addresses To Lists ............................................................ - 10 - 

A. Envelope Wizard .......................................................................................................................... - 10 - 

B. Account Manager ......................................................................................................................... - 11 - 

Section IV. – Managing Accounts and Lists ........................................................................ - 13 - 

A. Advanced Search ......................................................................................................................... - 13 - 

B. Mass Assign ................................................................................................................................. - 13 - 

Section V. – Summary ........................................................................................................... - 16 - 

A. Our Approach ............................................................................................................................... - 16 - 

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Section I. – Setting Up Constant Contact Integration

A. System Setup

Setting up Constant Contact integration begins in system setup. When you start Donation Tracker, go into System Setup and then select Your United Way.

For those of you that already have a Constant Contact account, you key in your Constant Contact account name and password in the space provided. Remember that the password is “case sensitive” so you must type it exactly using upper or lower case characters where appropriate. Once you’ve typed in your Constant Contact account information, click Save. That’s it. You are good to go. For those of you who do not have a Constant Contact account, you can sign up for free by clicking the Free Sign Up button. This will open a browser window and take you to Constant Contact’s free United Way sign up page. If you’d like to first read about the arrangement that Constant Contact has with United Way, you can click the Press Release button. This will open a browser window and take you to the Constant Contact press release page.

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B. Security Setup Next, you will have to grant yourself, and anyone else who will use Constant Contact, access to the Constant Contact screen. You do this under system setup and “Security Setup”

Find the Constant Contact column and check the box for any user who you wish to have access to Constant Contact. (Note: Users who do not have access to the Constant Contact screen can still assign and remove accounts to and from e-mail lists in the Account Manager. However, they cannot perform the task of creating or removing the e-mail lists themselves or performing the sync process.)

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Section II. – Syncing A. Constant Contact Integration and Syncing

Once you’ve entered your Constant Contact login information you click the newly added Constant Contact main menu option which was added to the Donation Tracker opening screen. When you click this menu option, Donation Tracker automatically connects with Constant Contact and downloads any existing E-Mail lists that you may have created previously. (Note: This is also when you find out if you keyed in your Constant Contact account information correctly. If there is a problem with your login information, you will receive an error message 401-Unauthorized. This simply means that Constant Contact doesn’t recognize the login information you entered in System Setup. Remember that the password you provided is “case sensitive”)

This screen is where all of the Constant Contact integration occurs. The first tab shows any existing email lists. The second tab is used to pull email information from Donation Tracker and upload it into Constant Contact. In addition this is used to assist you in syncing up pre-existing email addresses that are assigned to lists in Constant Contact and attempt to match that information back to your account’s email address in Donation Tracker. The ultimate goal here is to make sure that Donation Tracker’s email list and email address information stays in sync with Constant Contact. At any time you can click the Go To Constant Contact button, which will open a browser window and automatically take you to your Constant Contact account page.

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B. Managing Email Lists

If you are just starting out with Constant Contact, this grid will show one list called “General Interest”. The sole email address will be the email address associated with your newly created Constant Contact United Way account. Existing Constant Contact users will have this grid loaded with all of the previously created lists, and show you the number of email addresses that are currently assigned to the list. Although you can manage lists in Constant Contact, we’ve provided you with the ability to manage lists in Donation Tracker as well. To create a new Constant Contact Email list, click Add.

Key in the list name and whether you want to specify a sort order. When you click Save, the list name is automatically uploaded to Constant Contact. It is now available to be used in both Donation Tracker and Constant Contact. To change the name or sort order of the list, click Edit.

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To delete an email list, click Delete. Deleting a list obviously removes any email addresses from that list and the list name goes away. Those assigned email addresses are still in Constant Contact however. The email address may exist on other lists, or if this was the only list the email address was assigned to, the email addresses goes to a “hidden” list referred to as Unassigned. Constant Contact was designed such that once an email address has been added to their web site, it’s there forever. This is to help ensure that Constant Contacts anti-spamming policy is not abused. The three states that an email address can exist in are:

Assigned to one or more lists Unassigned Opted Out

Any email address that’s been “opted out” by the recipient cannot be re-added to any list unless the recipient themselves perform the action. You can refresh the list by clicking the Refresh button. To view the actual list of email addresses you can click the Show List Members button.

This report is showing you the actual list of emails addresses assigned to the given list as it currently exists in Constant Contact. The “Status” column indicates whether the email address is synced with an account in Donation Tracker. A status of “Synced” means that the email address is assigned to the given list in both Donation Tracker and Constant Contact A status of “Assigned – Pending Sync” means that the email address was assigned to a list in Donation Tracker and is awaiting the syncing process to upload it into Constant Contact. A status of “No Match Found” indicates that the email address from Constant Contact doesn’t match any exist email addresses in Donation Tracker.

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C. Syncing Records with Constant Contact

The second tab titled “Sync Records” is used to perform the actual uploading of changes in Donation Tracker and downloading of changes that occurred on the Constant Contact web site. This process is referred to as “syncing” Assigning emails to lists occurs in Account Manager and in the Envelope Wizard. We will discuss how to do this later in this document. To perform the actual “sync”, click the Sync. Records button.

Once done you will be prompted to enter a date. This date determines what changes will be considered for Syncing. Since the syncing process can take a very long time to occur if you were to check every single email address, every time you sync, you can just look at the changes that have occurred in Donation Tracker and in Constant Contact as of the date you enter here, and just sync those changes.

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Clicking the Sync button will start the actual sync process. The syncing process occurs in a specific order:

1. Look for new list assignments or list removals in Donation Tracker 2. Look for changes to actual email addresses in Donation Tracker that have occurred since the last sync

was performed 3. Look for opt outs that have occurred in Constant Contact since the last sync was performed. 4. Look for emails that were removed from all lists in Constant Contact since the last sync was performed 5. Look for emails in Constant Contact that don’t match up to email addresses in Donation Tracker 6. Look for list assignment changes that have occurred in Constant Contact since the last sync was

performed At any time you can check to see if changes were made to email and list information through the Constant Contact web site. This also includes any opt-outs which were received from previously sent email campaigns. Again, the goal is to ensure that the email lists and email addresses from both Donation Tracker and Constant Contact are 100% in sync. After the sync has finished running, you will see the results listed in the grid

Each sync action is categorized and summarized. For every category, you can print out the results by clicking on the category row and clicking the Print button. For email addresses where no match was found, you will have to find the account in Donation Tracker and add the email address through Account Manager. To assist you with this process you can print out this grid and use the output when searching for and matching up your accounts. When you’ve completed the process of matching these email addresses to your newly created or existing Donation Tracker accounts, you will need to return to the “Sync Records” tab and sync your changes with Constant Contact.

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It can be a bit tricky in trying to match up an email address with an existing account, especially if no account name information was provided in Constant Contact. You will have to decide whether you want to ignore those email addresses or do research to determine who that email address really belongs to.

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Section III. – Assigning E-Mail Addresses To Lists A. Envelope Wizard

You can assign accounts to Email lists in “Envelope Wizard” and on the “Edit Donor Info” screen.

Next to the E-Mail 1 and E-Mail 2 fields is a button that, when clicked, brings up a list of email lists. These email lists were obtained by going into the Constant Contact menu option and either downloading existing lists or creating them from within Donation Tracker. To assign the given email address you check the box that corresponds to the desired email list and then click the Save button. That’s it. You’re done. The email address has been assigned to the selected list(s) and will be uploaded to Constant Contact the next time you perform a sync process. Note: This list won’t appear unless you’ve first entered an email address.

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B. Account Manager Using Megan Murray from the example above we can go to Account Manager and pull up her account record and see what just occurred:

You can see that the email address MMurray@comtel.com was added to her account record. Next, let’s click on the newly added Constant Contact tab.

This screen shows the two lists that we assigned Megan’s email address to earlier. In addition to this we can add or remove Megan from lists if we want by clicking Assign To List.

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Because each account in Donation Tracker can have two email addresses, you were given the ability to assign each email address to lists independently. This was done not only as a convenience, but because in Constant Contact, each “Contact” can only have one email address. So if you were to add a second email address for Mary, her second mail address would appear as a separate “Contact” in Constant Contact. What this provides for is the ability to assign a work email to one list and a personal email address to another list. This also allows the ability for one email to be “opted out” and still receive emails through Constant Contact using the other email address. If a donor contacts you after receiving an email sent through Constant Contact, or if you know that this account does not want to receive email announcements or solicitations through Constant Contact anymore, you can check the “Do Not Email” check box for the given email address. This will remove them from any assigned lists and prevent them from being added to lists in the future. It will also place this email address on the “Opt Out” list in Constant Contact, which will occur the next time you perform the sync process.

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Section IV. – Managing Accounts and Lists A. Advanced Search

With the addition of Constant Contact comes the ability to manage emails and the lists their email addresses are assigned to as a whole, rather than just individually by account. We’ve updated Advanced Search in Account Manager to include useful search options which are used to help identify groups of accounts that you’d like to add to lists later using the “Mass Assign” feature.

These search options allow you the flexibility to specify which email address (#1 or #2) you wish to look for because many of our United Way customers use these two email addresses in different ways.

B. Mass Assign In this example we are going to search for all accounts that have an email address but are not yet assigned to an email list. In addition we don’t want to bother with accounts that are marked as “Do No Email”, so we make sure that this check box is checked “off”.

So we’ve entered the above Advanced Search options. Once we click the Search button we are shown all accounts that we want to assign to a list.

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In our example we are going to select all these accounts and using Mass Assign, assign them to the Annual Campaign email list:

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On the “Mass Assign” screen, select the newly added “Add or Remove From Constant Contact List” option from the drop down box. Next, select the list name and decide whether we are adding emails found in Email #1 or Email #2 or both. Once you click Assign, the selected email addresses are added to the selected list and will be uploaded to Constant Contact the next time you perform the sync process. To remove email addresses from a given email list you just repeat this process. Only instead of clicking the Assign button, you click Unassign.

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Section V. – Summary A. Our Approach

Many of our existing United Way customers are already using Constant Contact for sending Email campaigns. As such we thought it absolutely necessary to add these integration features. Instead of exporting lists out of Donation Tracker and manually importing them to Constant Contact, you can now easily maintain emails and lists in both systems. Because the folks at Constant Contact did such a wonderful job of allowing you to create very professional and polished looking email campaigns we didn’t bother with trying to “recreate the wheel”. All template creation and the sending of emails are still managed through the Constant Contact web site. Also, all tracking of campaign results, such as opt outs, click-throughs, etc. are still tracked in Constant Contact as well. Our approach was to make it easier for you to keep email addresses and lists in both systems in sync with one another. Hopefully we’ve accomplished that goal. As always, we appreciate your feed-back. If after using the new integration features you have suggestions for additional improvements, please let us know. If you haven’t taken advantage of Constant Contact and the opportunities and tools they provide, you may want to consider it. It’s free for you to use and with the newly added integration features, is easier than ever to use.