Process Change: Activate your DME before sending an email
As the GAIL database continues to grow and begins approaching nearly one million constituents, the size of audiences for communications has increased as well. In order to ensure that emails in your direct marketing efforts or event communications will process, the DAR IT and Advancement Services teams have come up with solutions to ease the final sending steps.
- First, if you plan on sending an email to more than 50,000 constituents, please notify askit@uga.edu when you plan to do so. You do not need to wait for a confirmation and they will add your job to their schedule.
- Second, you should activate your email direct marketing effort before sending it in Export. Not only does activating your marketing effort first allow for gifts to be applied quicker, it will reduce the chances of overloading database servers.
1 – Calculate segment counts
2 – Export effort – check the data but do NOT send final email yet
3 – Activate the effort if the data appears to be in order
4 – If changes were not made, go into the existing Export (step 2 above) and click Start email job (image below)
* Making changes only to the excel export will not effect the captured audience in your effort
* Should you make changes and need to remove members, that must take place after Activation and prior to Send Final Email.
Instructions for removing members: https://support.dar.uga.edu/GAIL/how-to-remove-constituents-from-a-marketing-effort/
We implemented this small change to ONLY email communications to encourage users to activate their email marketing efforts prior to sending the final email. This new alert DOES NOT APPLY to postal mail marketing efforts. If your DME is not yet activated, the button will now have a reminder that looks like this:
* The warning from the caption will be removed after the DME is activated. *
REMEMBER — Activating a direct marketing effort is what tags your communication on to a constituent’s profile and allows gifts to be associated to the marketing effort.