The data we gather from users is stored on our servers along with everything else on our servers, and the same security measures protect users' data as protect our own internal data. We use industry-standard methods to protect the confidentiality and integrity of your personal information. All data is secured in our key card locked colocation facility in Texas. Please note, however, that while there is no such thing as "perfect security" anywhere on the Net, we protect your data just as we protect our own. Furthermore, access to personal data is restricted within the company, and that all employees are aware that personal data, such as names and email addresses, are private. We do not share data between organizations, nor do we use customer data for our own purposes. We consider your data to be your own possession, and it is our job to be sure that possession is as secure as possible.
We monitor the systems daily and update security patches as necessary on our Enterprise Linux Servers, which are known for their security and reliability. Robust and mature software systems (namely Apache and Apache Tomcat) on the web servers reduce the risk of virus infection, buffer overflows, Remote Procedure Call violations, and other means of website attack. Additionally, our backend database servers are fronted by top end firewalls, and all external ports are locked down and monitored regularly.
We've been in operation since September 2003 and went through several months of beta testing. We officially launched the service in February. From February through May, approximately 50 organizations signed up to use the tools in varying capacities. We plan on being around well into the future!
Yes -- what you're talking about is a Recipient -- it's under the campaign tab. Just create a new recipient, then they'll pop up as an option in the campaign targeting section.
You can configure as many custom Recipients as you want to, and group them into groups to target multiple targets.
For some groups duplicate emails are listed twice, and there are sometimes old entries still cluttering up groups that would have been deleted. This all gets cleaned out prior to an email, and sometimes every week or so on the system. Your best indicator of the blast count before sending is in the preview screen. Additionally, some people who are in groups have unsubscribed (causing the Receive Email checkbox to be unchecked in their profile), so they will not receive emails.
To create more logins, look under the Configuration tab, and Add a new Campaign Manager. You can manage their permissions after you've created them with the Manage Permissions link.
It depends on how they unsubscribe -- on the unsubscribe page there are two options,
1. Remove from all future emails.
2. Remove from the membership rolls and all future emails.
The first option marks the Receive_Email flag as 0, meaning they won't receive any more emails. The second one removes them from your list entirely (i.e. it deletes them).
While uploads and most entry points to the system deduplicate against the email address, in various situations you can actually create 2 people with the same email address (For example, two people living in the same house). If the same email address is listed twice in the supporter list, for two different supporters, that individual will receive two emails. The system thinks of them as two seperate individuals, and so will send an email to each of them.
This is different than someone being listed twice in a group - the system understands when someone has been made a member of a group twice, and only sends them one email. A good rule of thumb is that a supporter will get at most one email for every time they are listed in your "Supporter List".
If a supporter is already in another chapter, and you upload them (you may have obtained their information from an event, etc), then their information will NOT be updated. However, your chapter will be marked as one of their secondary chapters, and any transaction information (donations, groups, etc) will also be updated in their record, even though you won't be able to access it without contacting their home chapter.
Remember, the chapter leader of a particular chapter is the one who has the ability to change and update that user's record, no one else.
Yes.
During step 2 of the import process, target a comma-delimited list of groups with Multiple Groups Generator. (you'll probably want the source data file as a whole to be tab-delimited, to make sure there's no possible confusion) Each different value will be rendered as a different group, thus:
info@democracyinaction.org (tab) GroupA,GroupB
... adds the record info@democracyinaction.org to the system, associates that record with GroupA and GroupB, and creates (if necessary) GroupA and GroupB. If groups of those exact names already exist -- and the multiple group generator is case-sensitive -- it will simply add the imported record to those groups.
Note that because the generator is case-sensitive, typos or alternate versions of the same group will be read as multiple groups. If one record says GroupA and the next says groupa, you'll get two different groups from the generator. Even if your data is in this state, it can be an easy process to handle once you've done the import, by using the query manager to populate from one group into another.
You can use the following line of code:
<!--break-->
to determine where a particular blog entry 'breaks' to the Read More section
If you don't want to display the 9 digit address, it's really easy to hide -- in your template, just put:
<style>#PRIVATE_Zip_Plus_4{display:none;}</style>
Fact: DemocracyInAction runs a hosted solution which works for most organizations, but tech savvy folks can run their own instance if they feel the need. We encourage people to consider things like email white lists, security certificates, and merchant accounts before running their own version, because these important aspects of organizing cost hundreds of dollars to set up
The technology is neither proprietary nor closed source.
Also, the open source model allows you to take your own set of code, and work with it as you see fit. It is based on the Java programming language, which has more engineers working on it than any single other language.
Fact: We're only here to provide the best tools and services at the lowest cost. Our scaling price structure is intended to reach groups of all sizes.
Too much? When considering costs, be sure to include costs of ownership (such as engineers to help you set it up), and also things that actually cost money to do: setting up a merchant account for donations -- ~$500; getting on white lists for email (bonded sender -- ~$2000); hosting --$10/month, phone supporter --~$?. That's what we have to be worried about, and what our costs are about -- not just a fee for software.
Too little? Open source is an extremely powerful movement, and technologies (such as databases) have progressed to the point that the free/open source solutions accomplish everything a nonprofit requires. Don't believe me? Ever use FTP? Yeah, free. Ever use Firefox? Free. Databases and web applications are moving in the same direction --
The information below will help you get started, but you can also look at the Quick Start Guide for a more detailed version of this information
The first thing you probably want to do is configure you Organization Information, under the "Configuration" tab on the top right of the screen. This is where you specify all the information about your organization, including any custom HTML that you want to use to make your page look like you want it to look.
After that, you may want to add some "supporters" to your system. Supporters are people who have somehow signed up to support your organization. This can include volunteers, donors, activists, or people who are some combination of these categories. To add supporters click on the "Your List" tab on the upper left. If you need to import an existing database of supporters, use the "Upload Supporter List" option under the "Your List" tab.
Next you probably need to configure the parts of Democracy In Action that are displayed to the people accessing your organizations website (aka external "Web Features"). These public web features include pages like: signup sheets, news items, contact politician campaigns, and events. A key step in making Democracy In Action external "web features" fit with the existing design of your site is setting up a web template in Democracy In Action based on your organizations home page. See the "Templates" tab on the top/middle of the screen.
At this point you would be ready to send a "blast" email to the supporters in your database. Go to the "Email Blast" tab (top left) if you want to do this.
Next, if you want to use our campaign tools to let your supporters use a web form to contact representatives and other recipients, click on the "Campaigns" tab on the top left. create a new campaign web page by clicking on the 'New Campaign' link on the list at left. Most of the fields are self explanatory, and there is context sensitive help available for any that you are confused about.
Yes, DemocracyInAction lets you use an existing merchant account, as long as it is run through Authorize.net, Verisign, LinkPoint or YourPay. We're adding more gateways quickly as well. Check with your current or prospective gateway provider to find compatible merchant accounts. Note that support for recurring donations for outside merchant accounts is severely limited. DemocracyInAction's default merchant account with Verisign will process recurring donations just fine. For our other providers:
Absolutely not.
Besides the setup and monthly fees for your particular toolset, DemocracyInAction bills for the following services:
There are many ways to update or change the content on your site, depending on how much custom work has been done on the site.
For most sites, content changes are generally made in the Headquarters, under the Web Features section. That is where 99% of the site content is handled. Choose the type of content that you want to update (news, issues, general content item, etc), then edit the corresponding data.
For most sites, we use a Header/Footer to wrap the content. This is the template we use that is consistent througout all your pages. To edit this content, go to Organization Information, then edit the Header HTML and Footer HTML areas.
For some custom sites, we have another method of editing the pages. If you have a custom site, we either set you up with Dreamweaver to edit the content of your site, or you can use the Edit HTML feature in the Headquarters to change individual pages. Different sites have different amounts of customization, so your particular situation might require a combination of editing the HTML page directly, and editing them using the Web Features area.
Yes -- donation pages are very customizable (you can add any custom fields and change most of the text on the page) and people use them for all kinds of things -- from membership fees, event registrations, etc. You can also have multiple donation pages and give them tracking codes to keep track of where they're coming from.
Every 6 Hours
They are called campaign managers, and you can find them under the Configuration section. You'll see a link there to add a new campaign manager.
This is usually because of cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word documents. Microsoft screws up quotes, and doesn't let other systems handle them well easily -- your best bet is to not cut and paste from a Microsoft document, or replace the quotes after you've pasted it in. We are working on a Microsoft -> English script that will remove the need for this.
On a larger scale, we have found that Microsoft applications do not play well with others, and tend to be more trouble than they're worth for website development. We understand that they are currently the most popular brand, but we highly recommend people consider moving to programs based more on standards, such as OpenOffice.org
Under the Configuration tab, choose Edit Campaign Managers, and enter a new password in the Password and Confirm Password boxes.
We are currently working with and are whitelisted with top email vendors, including Yahoo!. In addition, we have deployed a massively redundant and scalable email system that sends out email blasts quickly and efficiently using multiple machines. For larger lists of 100,000 members or more, this allows email blasts to deploy within a few hours. The distribution of senders also reduces the risk of halting an email blast based on the inevitable spam report by supporters loaded into our system. We encourage the regular maintenance of all lists, and employ a sophisticated Reply Manager to allow groups to quickly and easily manage thousands of replies. Automatic unsubscribe features come standard with all packages.
There are a few larger email vendors who are moving to a 'bonded' system for guaranteed no-spam email delivery-- Hotmail to name the largest. For larger groups who wish to guarantee email delivery to certain providers through the bonded setup, we offer a 'Bonded Option' add-on with prices depending on the contract.
A trigger is a rule in the system to send e-mails when visitors take certain kinds of actions (i.e., when they submit certain forms from your web site).
There are two basic types of triggers. A Reply trigger sends a message to the person taking a specific action -- for instance, "thank you," or directions to your event, or a donation receipt. An Individual trigger sends a message to a designated third party -- for instance, a notice to a staff member that someone has paid, registered or joined.
Using either requires two steps: defining the trigger (the message), and associating the trigger with one or more pages.
First, create the trigger. Find the Email Triggers section under the Your List or Email tab, and create it much as you would create anything else in the system. As with e-mail blasts, triggers send HTML and text versions simultaneously -- be sure to populate both boxes, even if it's with the exact same text. You can use merge fields to personalize your message in both the text and HTML versions -- for instance, "Dear [[First_Name]]". The Email field designates the recipient(s); use this for an Individual Email trigger, but leave empty for a Reply Email. In general, you can ignore the options after the From Email box. Note the Trigger Type: this field "names" the trigger and will be used in the next step to attach a trigger to a particular action.
Now, you're ready to pair the trigger to a web page. Simply go to the setup screen for your action or donation page and find the Trigger drop-down menu. Choose the trigger you have just created. For instance, if you named your trigger Custom A, you'll need to find Custom A in the drop-down menu. (Note that not all pages can be associated with all different types of triggers!)
Although one page can be associated with only one trigger name, you can haveseveral triggers called Custom A (or anything else); any action page associated with Custom A will deploy *every* Custom A trigger. You could, therefore, dispatch *both* a message to the supporter and a message to one of your staff members as a result of a single action. By the same token, you can have several different pages associated with the trigger Custom A. All of those pages will deploy the same message(s). You might do this to save some labor, with a generically-worded thank-you message associated with multiple different campaigns.
You can send as many emails (triggers) out to people as you want. All triggers with the same name will be processed in order. So if you wanted to send a reply email to the supporter, and a notification to you that someone signed up, you would create 2 seperate triggers. Also, you can put multiple emails in the 'Email' field in the trigger, just put commas between them. This allows you to send the same notification email to multiple people in your system, perhaps you and your finance department, for example.
DemocracyInAction has a very powerful Reply Manager to handle the tens of thousands of response messages delivered to the system. Emails can be grouped by arbitrary content, such as Invalid User, Re:, etc. in the subject or the content. Groups can then be added to user-defined folders for later processing or processing by another user. A group of responses can also be used to remove supporters, remove the email address, switch email preference, or add supporters to a group.
Each message that comes into the DemocracyInAction mail system is parsed for links to external sites, which are brought up beside each response. This is most useful for dealing with personal whitelists that require user intervention, or Earthlink messages where an image must be interpreted to continue receiving ACLU emails.
The reply manager is how we handle replies to an email blast, and any direct emails sent to your organization. It is where you go to process unsubscribe requests, see who has unsubscribed from the system, reply to supporters, and see the feedback from your email. There are means in the reply manager to process batches of replies, so you don't have to go through the potentially hundreds of emails individually.
The following merge fields are immediately available for all supporters in all emails.
| [[supporter_KEY]] |
| [[READONLY_Last_Updated]] |
| [[READONLY_Date_Created]] |
| [[PRIVATE_Last_Logged_In]] |
| [[Title]] |
| [[First_Name]] |
| [[MI]] |
| [[Last_Name]] |
| [[Email]] |
| [[Receive_Email]] |
| [[Email_Preference]] |
| [[Receive_Phone_Blasts]] |
| [[Phone]] |
| [[Phone_Provider]] |
| [[Street]] |
| [[Street_2]] |
| [[City]] |
| [[State]] |
| [[Zip]] |
| [[PRIVATE_Zip_Plus_4]] |
| [[Country]] |
| [[Company]] |
| [[occupation]] |
| [[Other_Data_1]] |
| [[Other_Data_2]] |
| [[Other_Data_3]] |
| [[Notes]] |
| [[Source]] |
| [[Tracking_Code]] |
| [[css]] |
| [[PRIVATE_module_presets]] |
| [[Status]] |
Additional merge fields are available for donation information and other information, and will be listed shortly.
To use any of these fields, simply place them exactly as they appear in your e-mail message. For instance, if you wished your e-mails to begin with a personal greeting such as
"Dear Sally,"
Simply compose a blast beginning with
"Dear [[First_Name]],"
You can also use these merge fields in trigger messages.
For supporters who do not have this value in their supporter record, the system will use a generic default value such as "Supporter" in place of first name. You can customize the value that appears in place of any field under the Configuration tab.
Yes, in the email blast interface, you CAN send out multiple test emails, just enter multiple comma delimited email addresses in the To field.
Unsubscribes are handled in two ways:
1) For email blasts sent with a demaction.org address in the "Reply-To" field:
* If the subscriber responds to the email with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject line, the system will automatically remove them from mailing lists, but not from the system entirely.
* If a subscriber replies to the email with the word "remove" in the subject line it will delete them from the system entirely.
OR
2) http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/YOURSHORTNAME/unsubscribe.jsp
will bring them to an unsubscribe page that will allow them to unsubscribe from your lists. Be sure to replace the YOURSHORTNAME with the short name of your organization (case sensitive), available in the top right corner of the Headquarters
If you add "?unsubscribe" to the end of the link, it will remove the option to completely remove someone from the rolls, and just mark their Receive_Email flag to be unsubscribed.
If you add "?remove" to the link, it will force their deletion from the database.
Email Templates are just an HTML document with some special comment tags wrapped around where the content needs to go. They follow the same structure as other templates in the system, and have the same syntax as a Dreamweaver template, so they can be edited natively in Dreamweaver (or many other graphical browsers). Here is an example template:
<html>
Uneditable Content, headers, images, etc go here
<!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="content" -->
Editable content goes here
change me change me change me
<!-- TemplateEndEditable -->
More Uneditable Content
<!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="content" -->
Edit Me Edit Me Edit Me
<!-- TemplateEndEditable -->
Can't Touch Me!!!
</html>
Add the following code to your email
&alt;form action="http://demaction.org/dia/api/process.jsp"&glt;
&alt;input type=hidden name="org" value="##"&glt;
&alt;input type=hidden name="table" value="supporter"&glt;
&alt;input name="Email" value=""&glt;
&alt;input type=hidden name="redirect" value="http://pagetogoto.com/"&glt;
&alt;input type=submit&glt;
&alt;/form&glt;
and replace the ## with your organization number , and the Redirect value with the page people go to when they're done signing up.
Do not cut and paste from any Microsoft product, including Word and Notepad. Use text pad, word pad or something else. Otherwise, put clean HTML in the source view by clicking the "<>" button in the editor.
The merge fields don't work when you send a test email because it's not pulling that name from the database.
Suggestion: Create a group with some test records in there and target the group.
Yes! Here's the URL that will contain a link to all of your previous blasts displayed online:
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/YOURSHORTNAME/blastContent.jsp
Why are my Sent and Clicked numbers not the same as my Total Click throughs on the individual links? Why don't the numbers add up?
These two numbers measure different information about an email blast. One measures which emails have been clicked on, and the other measures
how many times a link has been clicked. An example may help. Let's say you send 165 emails to your supporters.
Of these, the following chart shows what happened to each email
Send Failed 11
Sent 64
Sent and Opened 75
Sent and Clicked 15
These numbers will sum up to the total number of emails sent. An email can only be in one of these states -- if an email is Opened, it will move to Sent and Opened, and then if it's clicked on, it will move to Sent and Clicked. But the total number will always be the same. So, in this case, we note that 15 of the original emails that we sent out have been clicked on at least once (implying that they were Sent and Opened).
Now, after we've figured that out, we may want to check which links were clicked on. We see the following:
URL #1 8
URL #2 14
URL #5 2
But only 15 were clicked on! How could there be 24 click throughs????
Here's where it gets interesting. The second chart measures the actual number of clicks. Two links could have been clicked on, or a link could have been clicked on twice. Or someone could have forwarded it to a friend, who clicked on the same link. This would then show up as 2, or three, or more clicks in the second chart, even though that email only shows up once in the first chart (as being Sent and Clicked).
You can use these numbers to get a sense of how active your email blast is. For example, if 15 emails were clicked on somewhere, but registered 30 individual clicks, it's likely that the email was forwarded a lot.
(A side note: Open rates are not exact -- it depends on the email client on the other end, which delivers the open information to the server. Click through rates are better, but still not exact, because people can still cut and paste links in an email. It's best to follow a CHANGE in open rates on your list, rather than the absolute number, because that is generally a better way to think about it. Ahh, my open rate is going up! They must have liked the subject line .... etc, etc)
In order to protect member privacy, DemocracyInAction does not allow this. These types of fields are generally not secure against snooping and illicit alteration, and can be accidentally transmitted to other parties when the e-mail is forwarded. Enforcing this privacy protection helps DemocracyInAction maintain its "whitelist" e-mailing status and insures that all clients are able to circumvent spam filters to the fullest extent possible.
Email gets rejected from mail servers for a variety of reasons. A mailbox could be full, could no longer be around, or could be blocked. Of these reasons, some are considered Hard Bounces, which are generally from a mailbox that is no longer available and never will be again. Some are Soft Bounces which indicates a mailbox that may be available again, if it's full, for example. These are good broad categories, but they are by no means perfect.
Every different mail server sends back different responses about mailboxes not being available. Large providers of email frequently don't indicate why a message bounced, because that information could be used to determine who is actually a valid user on the system. Some mail servers in other countries return back messages that are incomprehensible in languages we use, or using terms that are not familiar. Some mail servers are just configured incorrectly, and are returning back bogus messages.
Because of a lot of these situations, we generally let people configure their own bounce actions, so it is abundantly transparent what the system will do. There is some notion of pre-made filters in the development schedule.
Sorry, no. You must post the doc online somewhere and direct people to that link. Sending attachments trigger spam filters.
It always is a challenge getting email addresses -- and there's a lot of different strategies to do it. I'll go through a couple that we've seen
A way we do NOT recommend is called list appending -- some vendors have big lists of names and email addresses, and if you pay them enough, they'll take your list and add the email addresses. The reason we don't recommend this is that it is a form of spam, and the email addresses you get are frequently very low quality (old, never used, never checked, etc)
Email is jut part of a communication with an individual, and there are many routes to get there. Of course, sending a mailing that drives people to your website to donate is a very easy and effective way to get an email address, because since people are already online, they'll have their email handy. This will get a good portion of your mail list --
If you ever talk to your supporters on the phone, for thank you's, change of address, etc, it's good to get their email address at the end of those phone calls as well. I know every time I call Geico they ask me to make sure my email address is up to date, and it's effective.
Alternatively, we've found that local events and chapters are good ways to get more information. Other online actions help to get the email address -- for example, you could send a message inviting your supporters to attend a local event, and have them register online using their email. Or gather email addresses at that event.
Most importantly, it's a process, not just a one time deal. You can't expect good results from just one action, but you can expect good results from all types of actions spread over a year.
Numbers depend a lot on the demographic you target -- for example, we have 90%+ of our supporters with emails, but different groups are unlikely to have that high a percentage.
In the system there are two types of tests you can run --
1. A quick test that just uses a simple script to send you an email copy of what you are writing. This is the test in Step 5 of the blast, and is usually used by groups to validate the layout of the email in different browsers and email clients. It does not do merge fields (because it can be sent to people not on your list, like an AOL test account), it does not pass through our international translation algorithms, it goes out instantaneously instead of queueing up for the recipient mail servers, and it comes from our front end servers instead of our primary mail servers.
2. A test blast -- this is where you actually send a real blast, but to a small group of people. It is indistinguishable from a regular blast to the system, and runs through all our processing algorithms/merge fields/translations, etc. We provide means to copy content from a previous blast after you complete your testing, but these are the real deal.
All of our organizations do both -- many of type 1 when developing a new template, and type 2 when evaluating merge field syntax and targeting. Frequently groups of over 5000 people will also use a third type of testing, which is based on sending data to a portion of your list, then evaluating open rates and click through rates based on content. It's also in the targeting section.
The dreaded non-standard characters (which often occur when pasting from a Microsoft program), which morph in the body of a message into the mildly irritating "?", cause the subject line to splatter horrendously. If the problem message has a subject line that begins with an "=", it's almost certainly the result of such a character. Single or double quotes and dashes are common offenders.
Yes, see the "Configuration" index tab, then "Preferences". The headers and footer for text emails is set in the Default Email Blast Text Header/Footer fields
Yes indeed.
Go to this url, replacing SHORTNAME with the abbreviation of your organization that appears in your other links:
http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/SHORTNAME/blastContent.jsp
This is a clickable list of e-mail blasts that you've sent. You probably don't want to send anybody to this page, since it will contain test messages, abortive blasts and things sent to specific audiences ... but if you select an e-mail message, it'll append the value ?email_blast_KEY=NUMBER where NUMBER is the same as the number that appears in the url of your headquarters during the course of creating an e-mail blast.
So, offering the link:
http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/SHORTNAME/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=NUMBER,
where SHORTNAME and NUMBER are replaced by the appropriate values unique to your organization and e-mail message, will direct them to a page where they should see the unadulterated html version of your blast.
The email scheduler is based on CENTRAL STANDARD TIME.
What good are email blasts that end up in junk folders or the trash? You can suggest that your users complete the steps below to ensure that they receive emails from you.
Web links to instructions on how to add email addresses to a list of approved senders.
If you use Microsoft Outlook, go to:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP052433571033.aspx
If you use Hotmail, go to:
http://www.imagine-msn.com/Hotmail/Post/Protect/SafeList.aspx
If you use Yahoo, go to:
http://help.yahoo.com/us/tutorials/mail/ab/ab_contacts1.html
If you use America Online, go to:
http://d01.webmail.aol.com/Help/detail_addresses_adding.aspx
Other e-mail programs typically use similar procedures to these.
Check with your e-mail provider if you have questions.
Your e-mail template is probably using div tags for structure, which is great -- except, they don't play particularly well with stylesheets in an e-mail context, and they're especially problematic in a web-based mail reader which will have its own stylesheets and possibly div tags competing with it. The div tag acts as a directive to force elements into particular spots. When it does that, it's running up against page coding and form structures in DemocracyInAction (which may result in elements appearing to overlap during the e-mail creation process); and, when it's delivered, with the stylesheets and form structures in web-based mail readers like hotmail or yahoo (which may have all sorts of exotic effects on the arrangement of your message).
E-mail templates are best built using table tags rather than div tags.
Stylesheets and html with e-mails are definitely a square peg in a round hole; it's especially true in web-based services like Hotmail and Yahoo, but can also be true in local applications, that the message you compose doesn't look exactly like what you receive. Settings in the e-mail program itself, and in the case of web-based browsers, style settings by the host, can alter the appearance of your message. A typical example: an e-mail you've opened in Hotmail calls to the stylesheet set in the page header -- that is, the Hotmail corporate stylesheet -- rather than the one in your message's header.
This is also why what one sees in several different providers or clients might have significant differences between them. Unfortunately, it's a byproduct of the anarchic formation of the Internet and the ad hoc adoption of html as an e-mailing standard.
Unless you make your entire message an image (not recommended -- spam filters won't like it and some people won't see it at all), you can minimize the damage but probably never avoid it altogether. The solution starts with testing -- ideally for any message, but certainly any time you inaugurate a new e-mail template or message format, send test versions to as many different mail clients and web platforms as possible. The adjustments from there are in your court.
That can happen. As always, your readers will be using many different mail clients; if they forward to other lists or forums, you have a third software program interpreting mail from a second platform, interpreting mail from out platform ... which you may have pasted from another editor altogether. It's difficult to control how these successions of programs will interpret mail.
In general, a plain-text message will need hard line breaks to control its width. If you compose it locally and paste into the text box, it probably won't have them, and this may cause some applications to print long lines of text with a horizontal scroll bar necessary.
If this is a concern, you might want to use the free web application Format Text to control the width of your messages. Setting to about 60-65 characters should be appropriate for the vast majority of potential readers.
We do support this, but this feature currently requires you to contact us ahead of time to pre-populate the information in your database. (a small development fee may be involved.)
You can do it right away.
Actually, you have two choices when targeting based on previous e-mail message. The first one, and most common, is simply to include or exclude people who have received some particular e-mail blast before. The fact that supporter X was in the target group for e-mail blast Y is marked in the system immediately, so you don't have to wait for all of e-mail blast Y to finish delivering before using this query term.
For the second option, you do have to wait. That's targeting based on "email status" -- send failed, sent, sent and opened or sent and clicked. These status reports are only fully available after the blast has been completed, so to query based on these terms, you would need to wait until after the blast has gone out in its entirety.
Short answer: like a golf score, low is good.
Long answer: this is the scoring system for judging incoming e-mails as probable spam as used by SpamAssassin, a popular open-source anti-spam application that many e-mail recipients may have running locally to help filter out unwanted e-mail. There are no absolute figures here -- a higher number indicates an increased likelihood that the filters as configured on some local machine will judge it to be spam (whether or not it is SpamAssassin or another application filtering the message on the receiving end). The full scoring algorithms are hosted by SpamAssassin here; the project's Frequent Asked Questions are here.
There are some free third-party web resources -- such as E-Zine Check and Content Checker -- that can give you additional information about how likely your message content is to activate client-side spam filters and tips about word combinations you might want to change.
When dealing with large lists, there are some common occurrences that come with managing lots of emails. Unsubscribes, and irate individuals who think they've unsubscribed are par for the course. Usually a few a month for lists >10,000, or a few a week for >100,000 is not uncommon, and the solution is often to just sort out what's going on in their particular situation.
The common reasons why someone would think they've unsubscribed, but would still be getting emails are:
A. (The most common) They have another email address that is fowarding to them, and they unsubscribe one but not the other. Most of our organizations get a few of these a week.
B. (Less common) They are re-uploaded after having unsubscribed -- When an organization re-uploads a list, we will deduplicate them if they have unsubscribed in the past, but not if they have been completely removed from the database (aka 'Deleted'). We caution groups against reuploading original data, because information has been obtained about those people in the meantime (e.g. Unsubscribes and Bounces).
C. They have multiple versions of their email, and have unsubscribed one but not the other. For example, chris & chris+test go to the same account for the writer.
. D. They are not receiving emails from you, but from another organization. (This is very uncommon)
Groups are a way to segment your supporters into seperate sections. A supporter can be a member of multiple groups. A group can have as many members as you want. When you send out email, you can include or exclude certain groups from that email blast.
Groups are a good way to handle multiple listserves, manage donors (or potential donors!), organize people in different regions, or who receive emails in different languages.
You can either:
A: Upload supporters directly into a group using our Upload Supporter List feature. Be sure to create the group first!
B: Add them by hand by editing the supporter (see List Supporters). If you have any groups you have the option to add them to a group.
C: Use our Query List feature to add supporters in bulk to a group. You can use this method to add tens of thousands of supporters to a group at the same time.
We keep our own internal identifier for each supporter in the system. However, for all intents and purposes, the email of the supporter is the unique identifier. Every time we add or update a supporter, we check the email, and use that to determine which supporter to update. For example, if you tried to add someone with the same email address twice, it will just update the existing member. If someone signs up twice through a web page, it will update their existing information, rather than adding another person.
This does mean that you cannot have 2 supporters with the same email address.
Yes. The place to add other email addresses would be in a Custom Field that you define, or in an available 'Other Data' field. Custom Field probably makes more sense. This supporter will NOT receive email to these other addresses. If you need a supporter to receive email at two seperate addresses, you must create another supporter.
A supporter is how we keep track of individuals in the system. Each person associated with your organization is a supporter. A supporter has a lot of information associated with them, and is a part of just about every part of the list management. Volunteers are supporters. Supporters attend events, and receive email. They start chapters, donate online, and tell their friends, who then become supporters. It's a creepy kind of viral thing.
If the supporter has an email address, we will recognize that supporter and update the information with the information you have in the supporter file. We use the email address to determine an identical supporter. So you can upload the same file twice, with new information in it, and we will update the information that has changed.
We handle your custom fields the same way.
If you screwed up loading new supporters into the database, you?re probably okay, and the problems can be resolved.
If the email was uploaded successfully, you can upload the exact same list again with the correct settings, and it will update the database accordingly. This also means that if you load the same file twice, nothing will change.
If you didn?t get the email correct you can delete all the supporters you uploaded using the Query Manager delete feature, then try again. But be careful, you don?t want to delete the wrong supporters!
Ick, you're pretty much hosed. In severe cases we can restore to the previous night's backup, but we'll have to charge you for that. If you have one of the accounts on our testing servers, they are frequently refreshed with a recent backup, so you may be able to retrieve data from there, but don't count on it. If you're about to get fired over deleting every supporter in your organization, please let us know, and we'll see what we can do.
The fastest and easiest way to find a supporter is usually using the List Supporters link. Clicking on List Supporters brings up a list of all your supporters, then use the Search fields at the top of the page to find the supporter you want. Simply choose the field that you want to search on in the drop down list, then enter in the search value. You don?t have to enter in the whole value, either ? a ?%? sign acts as a wildcard!
For example, if you wanted to find a supporter with Email address ?jsmith@mybigdomain.com?, you would choose Email in the drop down box, then enter ?jsmith%? for the value, and hit Enter
For more advanced searching, such as searching by donation or by Custom Field, use the Query Manager.
Segmentation is the term used to describe dividing your supporters based on different demographic data. For example, you could segment your supporters into ?Supporters in Indiana?, or ?Supporters who have donated?. DemocracyInAction handles segmentation through our Query Manager, which is also tied in with our Email blast tool. Using the Query Manager, you can assign people to Groups, delete batches of supporters, export to Excel, and more --
There are two ways to get information about your supporters ? through our pre-built reporting functions, or exporting a segment of supporters yourself.
You?ll find a host of pre-build reports under the Reports section, many of which give different sets of information about supporters. For example, you can get reports on supporter donation totals, numbers and counts of supporters by district, etc. All of these reports can then be sent to a CSV or Excel file for further manipulation. Let us know if there is a useful report that you can?t find in the report section, and if it sounds reasonable to us, we?ll add it in!
If you want to export data about your supporters, for walking lists or other reasons, you can use the Query Manager. Through the Query Manager you can build a query that contains the supporters you wish to report on, using the same segmentation tools as for Email Blasts, then you can select the fields you wish to export.
Usually this is because the Email address is not unique, or there isn't an email address. We use the email field to uniquely identify a supporter -- if there is no email, then a unique placeholder must be placed there. If two supporters have the same email address in the list you are uploading, one of them will be wiped out. The last one in the list will be the one in our database.
The best way to create distinct lists is to use the Group feature. A Group is a subset of a list, and an individual can be a member
of as many groups as you want, and you can target by groups. The procedure is
1) Create a group under List Manager -> Manage Groups
2) Upload your list
3) on the second Upload page, you'll see a drop down list of existing groups -- select the one you just created.
When the people go into your system, they'll go into your master/main list, then also into that group --
Nope. Well, okay, let's pretend the limit is realistically 500 for the interface. But it runs through the same engine as the supporters, which cap out in the millions.
You need to run a query if you want to look for supporters using more than one type of information (i.e Groups and State). Look under the Query Link in the List Manager, and choose the groups and/or states for the individuals that you want --
http://www.democracyinaction.org/YOURSHORTNAME/profile/
People can view and update their information (including action and donation history) by logging into their profile editor. You can put the following URL in all of your outgoing emails:
http://www.demaction.org/YOURSHORTNAME/profile/
Deduplication of your list automatically happens using the email address as the deduplication field when people sign up on your website or you upload individuals. In some situations, however, there is a need to deduplicate based on information other than the email address(if there is no email available, for example).
To handle this, there is a Deduplication feature under the List Manager that will walk you through deduping your supporters. First, select the fields that you want to deduplicate on (Last Name/Zip is a common choice). Next, a screen will pop up showing the duplicates in your database from those fields.
On this next screen, you need to select a "Primary" record, and one or many "Secondary" records. By default, the first one is selected as the primary record. The primary record is considered the main record, and any information in the primary record will stay the same (such as name/address information). If there is no information in the primary record for a particular field, it will be written with data from the secondary record.
All donations, group memberships, interests, actions, etc. will be copied to the primary record, and the secondary records will be removed. This cannot be undone.
You also have the option to "Ignore" one of the records. This is usually selected when it's not actually a duplicate individual. When you have selected the deduplication options for an entry, select "Merge", and the data will be put into the same record.
If some of your Groups are public (i.e. the Display to User flag in the group configuration is checked), then these will show up in your unsubscribe page as an option to be removed from.
DemocracyInAction handles a lot of large lists, and the calculation to exclude members of certain groups takes a little while. We don't do this for every email blast, but we do do it periodically, and for every time a query is run.
So if you want to exclude groups, or campaigns from a blast, you need to create a query first and run it (under Your List -> Query List and Export data), then the data will be cached for us to use in the email blast.
Yes, the upload can handle donations, event transactions, group memberships, and a bunch of other things. In the second step of the upload you can select donation amounts/dates/etc as some of the columns.
Your database probably has a unique ID in there for users -- the place for that in our system is the "uid" field, which is a special field for us expressly for outside identifiers. The system uses that ID (or the email address) to pair donations up with supporters, so it should be in both uploads. Alternatively, and email would be used if there was no uid.
To export contacts from Microsoft? Outlook? 2002 to a CSV file
1. On the File menu, click Import and Export. This opens the Import and Export wizard.
2. Click Export to a file, then click Next.
3. Choose the file type you want to export to. For example, Comma Separated Values (Windows) or Tab Separated Values (Windows), then click Next.
4. Select a folder to export. For example, Contacts. Then click Next.
5. Enter a file name. For example, myaddresses.csv or myaddresses.txt. Then click Next.
6. When you see the choice of possible actions, click Map Custom Fields (don't choose Export from Contacts folder ).
7. Select the mappings you want to include. Map at least "First Name", "Last Name", and "Email Address." Then click Ok.
8. Click Finish to finalize the export. Now you can import this file into your AIM Mail account.
To export contacts from Microsoft? Outlook Express? 6 to a CSV file (tab-delimited is not supported)
1. On the File menu, click Export, select Address Book.
2. Select Text File (Comma Separated Values), then click Export.
3. Enter a file name. For example, myaddresses.csv.
4. Choose the location to save it.
5. Select the fields to export. Select at least "First Name", "Last Name", and "Email Address" and other items you want to bring into AIM Mail. Then click Finish.
6. Click OK when the alert box appears telling you the export was successful. Now you can Import this file into your AIM Mail account.
Yes. Point them to the profile manager here.
Yes --
Just create a list with the email address and a Zero column (in Excel, or the like), save it as a tab delimited file, so it looks like:
chris@dia.org(tab)0
bob@smith.org(tab)0
Then just run an upload/Import, and set the Receive_Email database column to the second value (and Email to the first of course) -- that will unsubscribe them all.
This works with updating any user records.
Note: This will not put them into the "unsubscribe" list, you would have to upload them into that list as well
Select fields -- which appear in our system as drop-down menus -- require some care when you're doing an import to match to them.
The title, state and country fields (visible under Standard Fields in a supporter's record) are the most common fields for this to occur on. Title and country will pull whatever the import list has entered, but it will only display in the supporter's record if it exactly matches one of our own options. Still, the field is populated, and it will appear on exports and mail merges.
State has the same behavior, but it does an intelligent match for U.S. states and Canadian provinces. Either the full state name or the postal abbreviation should generate the correct result, and other variations (e.g., "Ore." for Oregon) might do so as well.
When importing transaction data, you'll have the same issue with the Form of Payment and Transaction Type fields. The fields in your import must match DIA fields exactly in order to import properly.
Use the advanced features to disable e-mail matching.
There are three source codes associated with every supporter:
Source (Web,File, etc -- broad sources of individuals)
Source Details (the web page, donation page, the filename, etc) This automatically gets assigned (so a Petition page would do it, as would all signup/donation/etc pages).
Source Tracking Code - A user definable code usually indicating market source (Yahoo, Google, etc), or arbitrary codes
As for naming conventions, we encourage larger organizations to establish standards for the Tracking Codes. For example, if you do a Google ad buy from the development/fundraising department, the tracking code could be something like:
devel-google-01-25.
They can be up to 128 characters long, and reports can then be pulled for them.
Groups can be used in a similar manner, and there's a couple other places data like this is stored (Interests, etc), but we try to think of the Source code fields as the information about where they are coming from -
There are a few ways people can be added to a group:
People can sign up directly to a group through a Signup page (or Petition page). During the configuration of the signup page, just specify which groups you want people to be a member of. Be sure the group exists with a good description, so people will know what they are signing up for!
An administrator can add someone to a group individually, in the Headquarters, by finding and editing the supporter, and clicking on the Groups tab.
You can upload a list directly into a group.
When you run a query, one of your options is "Source" -- that is usually the file name for the people you uploaded -- you can delete them en masse using Query List and Export data (just create a new Query, and choose the Source link) -
Every group has a checkable box, "Display to supporters?" You can locate this box by choosing Manage Groups under Your List, then clicking on the group you wish to modify. When the box is checked, supporters can see whether they are a member of the group when they log in. When it's unchecked, they can't see it -- the information is strictly internal to your organization.
You can do this with a line or two of code, included anywhere on the form in the page.
If you've got a page with some groups available for people to join at their option with a check box, you can add groups they'll join automatically with this:
<input type="hidden" name="link" value="groups">
<input type="hidden" name="linkKey" value="12345">
Where 12345 is the group key number (seen in the url when you click on that group).
To do the inverse -- add a visible group checkbox to a page -- use this code:
<input type="hidden" name="groups_KEY12345" value="true">
<input type="checkbox" name="groups_KEY12345_checkbox"
CHECKED>Group Name
Where 12345 is the group key number and Group Name is any name or description you want to give of the group on the web page (it need not match the name of the group in our system).
You can also use these to customize the placement or appearance of groups on the page, beyond what you can do using the headquarters setup tools alone.
In the Query interface in either the email blast or the Query Manager there is a section to target on Supporter Information. In the drop down list of supporter fields you?ll find all the custom fields that you have defined for your organization.
If you define a multiple choice field, and want to change it later, it is very hard to figure out what you?re going to change the values to, and update supporters accordingly. You can add values to the end of a multiple choice fields, or reword them, but remember that all supporters will still keep the same choice they originally selected.
If no supporters have entered information about this field yet, your best bet is to delete it and start a new one.
* 50 varchar fields (variable length character fields)
* 25 boolean fields (true/false)
* 10 integer fields
* 10 large binary "blobs" (eg. pictures or sounds)
* 10 floating point number fields
* 3 custom date fields
* 20 multiple choice fields (integer values only for supporter import)
* 5 set fields (bit set fields?)
(as of Sept 2005)
Many things could be happening, but here's some common cases:
Yes, you can upload people into specific groups -- the 2nd page of the upload wizard provides an option to add the supporters automatically to a group (Create the group first for the options).
Additionally, the supporter import/upload tool now supports super flexible supporter group assignment on import. Specifically, if you have an import field which contains comma separated group names, for the target database field, you can choose the "Multiple Group Generator" option to automatically put that supporter row into all the groups listed in the field.
You can also have your import data contain one column for each group the supporter row should be a member of. In this case, you would choose the "Create a new group for this field" option for the target database import field. If that column is non-blank for a given supporter import row, then that supporter will be added to the group who's name corresponds to the column name. (BGS 5/05)
You need to first create the file in the system, then upload your content.
Under Web Features, in the bottom left corner, there is a link to Edit your Website Directly (or a listing of files, if this has already been chosen). Click the link, then refresh the screen.
There will now be a link at the bottom left to create a new html file (e.g. myFile.html). Create the file, then when the screen refreshes, click on it to edit the file. Paste your code or text into the resulting screen, and save, and you have your new HTML file.
To export data from eBase to upload into the DiA system, use the following procedure:
In eBase:
From the Reports menu, choose Special Use Reports, then pick Export for Enhanced Data. Select ".tab" as the export format and choose a name.
Save the file.
To import into the DemocracyInAction.org system:
Go the the Your List section
Select Import File
Follow the import procedure
The main method we receive large files by (that is not through email or through our Upload features on the site) is through SCP (or SFTP). SCP is a secure file transmission protocol that transmits large files
Many FTP clients have a "Secure" option, that will let you use Secure FTP to transfer the file. If you already have a FTP program that you are used to using, see if there is a "Secure" checkbox or option for it.
If you do not currently have an FTP or SCP program, or your FTP program doesn't support secure mode, try the following free software programs:
For Windows, try WinSCP:
http://winscp.net/eng/index.php
If you are using an Apple, try Fugu
http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/
Ask DemocracyInAction about the server name, the username, and password for the upload.
Okay, the short answer that you may have heard from us before is, "DIA deduplicates on e-mail address." For most groups, you'll never need to know anything other than this.
If you really do want to know, however ...
The system's deduplication logic actually uses a cascading sequence in which it checks the following fields for each incoming supporter record and compares them to the database to determine if a record exists:
1) supporter_KEY (this is an ID number for the record in DIA's supporter table)
2) uid (this is an available field in the supporter record that groups can optionally populate with, for instance, the identifier from another database)
3) e-mail address
The advanced features allow you to disable the third option, or make a different field in the supporter table the third option.
At each step, the system essentially asks, "Is there a supporter key/uid/email in the system matching the one I have?" If the answer is no, it moves on to the next element -- or, if it has checked all three fields, creates a brand new record. If the answer is yes, it deduplicates by adding to overwriting the existing record.
The uploader recognizes each new line as a new record -- because of this, if there is a new line or return in the incoming data, it will treat that row as multiple records. This frequently leads to mismatched data, and junk entries.
The easiest solution is to replace newlines in the incoming data.
This can be done in Microsoft Word or Excel by replacing the return characters.To replace the return characters,
open the Replace screen, and type Alt-010 in the replace box(hold down the Alt key, and type 010). Type a replacement character such as a comma, and replace all entries.
In some newer versions, a '^p' character can be used instead of the Alt keyboard combination.
Yes, you can customize triggers using the [[ ]] merge field syntax. Using the Append All Values checkbox when you're testing your customized trigger is usually the best way to figure out what fields you can use.
The append all values button gives you the information that you have available to be merged, and it can be merged right in the email itself,
using the [[Field_name]] syntax. So, for example, [[amount]] would give you the amount, [[First_Name]] would give you the first name, and [[CURRENT_DATE]]
would give you the current date
For Example -- this is a custom donation trigger you can use in the HTML body of a trigger, that will prepopulate some of the information:
Dear [[First_Name]]:
Thank you for your donation of $[[amount]]!
You can print this email as a record of your donation for your tax purposes.
Donation Summary:
Confirmation Code: [[PNREF]]
Donation Amount: $[[amount]]
Donation Date: [[CURRENT_DATE]]
Donation Made By: [[First_Name]] [[Last_Name]]
You can use the term "NOW" or "CURRENT_DATE" to put the current date into the output of a trigger
A trigger is a rule in the system to send e-mails when visitors take certain kinds of actions (i.e., when they submit certain forms from your web site).
There are two basic types of triggers. A Reply trigger sends a message to the person taking a specific action -- for instance, "thank you," or directions to your event, or a donation receipt. An Individual trigger sends a message to a designated third party -- for instance, a notice to a staff member that someone has paid, registered or joined.
Using either requires two steps: defining the trigger (the message), and associating the trigger with one or more pages.
First, create the trigger. Find the Email Triggers section under the Your List or Email tab, and create it much as you would create anything else in the system. As with e-mail blasts, triggers send HTML and text versions simultaneously -- be sure to populate both boxes, even if it's with the exact same text. You can use merge fields to personalize your message in both the text and HTML versions -- for instance, "Dear [[First_Name]]". The Email field designates the recipient(s); use this for an Individual Email trigger, but leave empty for a Reply Email. In general, you can ignore the options after the From Email box. Note the Trigger Type: this field "names" the trigger and will be used in the next step to attach a trigger to a particular action.
Now, you're ready to pair the trigger to a web page. Simply go to the setup screen for your action or donation page and find the Trigger drop-down menu. Choose the trigger you have just created. For instance, if you named your trigger Custom A, you'll need to find Custom A in the drop-down menu. (Note that not all pages can be associated with all different types of triggers!)
Although one page can be associated with only one trigger name, you can have several triggers called Custom A (or anything else); any action page associated with Custom A will deploy *every* Custom A trigger. You could, therefore, dispatch *both* a message to the supporter and a message to one of your staff members as a result of a single action. By the same token, you can have several different pages associated with the trigger Custom A. All of those pages will deploy the same message(s). You might do this to save some labor, with a generically-worded thank-you message associated with multiple different campaigns.
Note that some triggers -- the named ones such as "On Blog Comment" or "On Payment" -- come with predefined associations with particular events. For these types of triggers, you generally will not need to do the second step of associating them with a particular page or action. You also do not have flexibility with them to pair them with other types of actions.
Just add a single line of code to the forms:
<input type="hidden" name="trigger" value="On Signup">
Or value="Custom A" or the name of whichever trigger you wish to activate.
Yes. This variable (where 000 is the group key number, visible in the url when you click on the group in question under the Your List tab) will produce a 1 where the group has been checked:
[[groups_KEY000_checkbox]]
Consider terminology such as, "The person joined Newsletter #1 if there is a 1 in this box: ( [[groups_KEY6_checkbox]] )"
Yes, when you specify Supporter Information, you can use wildcards. DIA uses the MySQL query syntax for queries, and you can use an underscore('_') to match any one character, and a percent sign ('%') to match all characters. But be sure to use the 'like' operator, otherwise we will try to match those characters!
For example, to match Jim or Jane, you could select
First Name like J%
If you wanted to match anyone with a street address, you would choose
Street like _%
Wildcards can be used for almost all fields.
In the DemocracyInAction database, we handle Yes/No/Checkbox and Multiple Choice values using numbers. For a No value, we use a ?0?, and for Yes we use 1. For multiple choice values, we number them starting with 0 (don?t ask, it?s a computer thing).
As an example, let?s pretend you have 2 custom fields defined:
with options: Red,Blue,Green.
Now you want to target all the people who DID vote in 2000, and like the color Red. So in the Query interface, under Supporter Information, you would choose ?Did you vote ??, then for the value, you would enter ?1?, and add it. Next you would choose ?What is your favorite color??, and enter ?0? for the value ? remember we start the counting at 0! After adding the item, you can move on. If you wanted ?Green? lovers, you would enter in 2 for the color value.
Yes. You can set the Preferred communication method for a recipient in the Edit Recipient screen, which will override the default targeting for that campaign. Recipients with a Preferred communication method set will only receive communications via that method
Usually the procedure is to use a filter to find certain messages (like "invalid email", etc), then take action on those messages to either clear those people out, remove their email address, process their whitelists, etc.
Common filter phrases are things like "Returned message", "User Unknown", etc.
To filter your incoming messages look under Email Blast --> Email Filters -- you can filter your incoming messages based on arbitrary message content of your own specification, and select different responsed to content of the sender, subject, or email address.
Email headers are extremely unreliable ways to manage lists -- all mail servers handle them differently, and bounces don't always come back with all of them. For example, as of this writing the three biggest providers (aol, yahoo, msn) don't spit back all the headers you give them, so this would fail as a confirmation method for those users.
Listservs implementing these methods generally have a very fixed user base, running on reliable mail servers (like a university) It's likely that this listserv deals primarily with a very established user base --
Not at this time. Note, if you try and search by month abbreviation (eg. Apr), it sometimes won't work. This is because the email date is not in the email contents in some cases.
A DemocracyInAction campaign is an online resource for your supporters to send letters to local and national legislators, or to individuals and recipients whom you specify.
To start an online campaign, in your headquarters click on the link New Campaign. This will bring you to a screen where you specify all the parameters of this campaign. Specify some information in the fields (you don't need to know it all right now! You can change this later --), then click on Submit. That's it! Your campaign has been created, and you can preview it using the links at the top of the page. Send an email out to people to let them know about your campaign, and be sure to give them the link to the campaign!
For contacting Reps, we have built a system that works transparently with Congressional web forms for email, which 90+% of Reps use for constituent letters. When a supporter sends an email to Congress, the system recognizes those that use custom web forms, and submits the email through their forms instead of their direct email address. This system monitors changes in the web forms daily, and populates all available and required data to send messages from constituents to Congress. At the change of any Congressional web form, we are immediately alerted and generally (though not always) have the new form analyzed and parsed within 48 hours.
For state and local representatives (including governors), we have the ability to analyze their forms on a per case custom basis to integrate with our system. And as with all our custom offerings, once the forms are processed for one group, the benefits reach all.
There are 2 ways you can have Tell a Friend information for a campaign. The first way (the default way), is to enter in information in the Spread The Word Text field for the campaign. When a supporter takes action, they will automatically get redirected to a thank you page which will contain the "Thank you Text or HTML", and a "Spread the Word" email section with your Spread the Word Text. They can email their friends from this page. It is useful to put links in the Spread the Word text (which goes out in the email), so people can link back to the campaign once they receive your email.
The second way to handle things is to use the Redirect Path. If you enter data in this field, it will redirect the supporter to this page instead of the default page after they take action. This can be any page you want -- a custom page, or an existing Tell A Friend page. This allows you to customize the experience of the supporter. Perhaps they get passed onto a custom donation page?
Yes, you do have to explicitly set these values if you want to send emails or faxes. And do the best you can to estimate the maximum number of mail or faxes you want to send. This is how we plan on how to scale our systems and distribute the load.
Yes, you can find this by using the following URL:
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/YOURSHORTNAME/campaign.jsp
Users have the option to check a box that says "Remember Me" (in which case we'll use cookies)
Yes, you can default a campaign to fax or email, just select Hide Type Options in the campaign, and select the Email or fax option.
No. We've spent a lot of time an effort thinking about this one -- and talking to representatives and recipients of campaigns about how they deal with messages -- the hijack phenomenon is incredibly small, something like only 1 in 2000 actions taken (where people use a campaign feature to promote the opposing view). From the recipient side, letters with the same subject and first line are discarded most of the time (it's treated as spam). We've chosen to not allow the option for an uneditable first half of a message because it does not help campaigns, and generally hurts them in 95% of cases (because of the discards). It also goes against the whole idea of individuals writing their representatives about their personal views on an issue.
Let us know if you experience significant nefarious uses of faxing, and we won't charge you for that of course, and will look to see what the catalyst was.
Yes -- you can always view the content of the letters that are sent. Under the Campaigns tab, there is a link for Written Campaign Letters. Also, if you click on the Quick Charts link, you can see a chart of actions, and clicking on the chart will provide you a list of all the actions that have been taken.
In addition, you can also run a Campaign Similarity Report, which will give you a report on who wrote letters different than the suggested letter, so you can identify your most active supporters.
No, DemocracyInAction uses the state, the zip code, and the Zip+4 to resolve which state or national representative the message is supposed to go to. Unless a particular legislator is targeted explicitly, the message will go the individual's representative.
Yes -- in the Suggested Subject field, just put one potential subject per line. The campaign page will randomly select between all these subjects to display to the user.
Yes, you can -- kudos to Lisa Grob of Friends of the Earth for identifying this solution. Supporter information for anyone identifiable to the headquarters will automatically appear in the appropriate fields by appending a variable string such as this to the campaign url:
&First_Name=[[Supporter.First_Name]]
So, a full campaign link might look something like: http://www.demaction.org/yourorg/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=XXX&First_Name=[[Supporter.First_Name]]
The example above would add the first name only. However, any number of variables can be added in such a string -- for instance:
&First_Name=[[Supporter.First_Name]]&Last_Name=[[Supporter.Last_Name]]&Email=[[Supporter.Email]]&Street=[[Supporter.Street]]&City=[[Supporter.City]]&State=&Zip=[[Supporter.Zip]]
(see http://hq.demaction.org/dia/hq/faq.jsp#28 for more available merge fields)
These strings can, of course, be used not only for campaigns, but any page with a fillable form.
THIS FEATURE MAY RAISE PRIVACY CONCERNS FOR YOUR SUPPORTERS -- USE WITH CAUTION. Urls such as this one, when a supporter forwards to their friends or a public listserv, may cause the original supporter's information to appear filled in when third parties click on the link.
It's probably a cookie problem. In a two-step (preview page) campaign, the person taking action must have cookies enabled on his or her computer.
A cookie, simply stated, is a small tracking file which a web site places on your computer.
In a one-step campaign without the preview page, the supporter's information submits directly. In a two-step campaign, the information from the first page gets stowed with a cookie while the user completes the second page, and is then retrieved. When cookies are being disallowed, the preview page produces an error message because it no longer has access to the supporter information.
Work-around choices are to do a one-step campaign, or to instruct people in the campaign description that cookies must be enabled.
For the test mode, the best way is to just create yourself as a custom recipient, and target that, instead of targeting the legislators.
Alternatively, you can set the Max # of Emails to Send option in the campaign to "0", which will block all emails --
Are you sure you really want to know?
Most campaigns process messages to Congress, which are jammed through web forms which members set up to make it inconvenient for people like you to send them messages. On those forms, there's no salutation -- it's not really relevant to the medium. You can obtain .pdf printouts of the messages your constituents submitted, formatted as regular letters, under the Campaign Activity Reports in the Campaigns section, and in some cases you may want to actually deliver the physical copies of these letters. These letters mail-merge the sender and recipient address information, and use a generic salutation such as "Dear Senator."
For submissions that do not use web forms (such as custom recipients), the system can prepend a salutation you specify. The system looks first for the salutation line in the Options tab of the campaign setup; if that field is not populated, it looks to the Salutation line you specify in the custom recipient's editable area. If neither of these are available, it will prepend no salutation at all.
Note that both these Salutation fields should be the full salutation, e.g., "Dear Ms. Smith," as opposed to simply "Ms. Smith." Note also that you can accomplish the same effect simply by emptying the Salutation fields and simply including the salutation in the body of the campaign message you intend to send.
This isn't easy, and you'll need to be comfortable working with the code.
You need three variables:
*the web address to which the form submits (NOT that where the form itself resides) -- this should be available in the code of the form page by viewing source and searching for "form action"
*the named parameters of the web form
*the DemocracyInAction variables corresponding to those parameters (see a list here: http://hq.demaction.org/dia/hq/faq.jsp#28)
All the necessary information should be in the form submit code on the offending web form's page. Here's an example of how to combine the information, taken from a submission that goes through New York Gov. Pataki's webform:
http://161.11.3.75/itweb/itcustom.nsf/GovernorEmail?OpenForm&Seq=1&__Click=0&FName=[[First_Name]]&LName=[[Last_Name]]&Email=[[Email]]&Address=[[Street]]&City=[[City]]&State=[[State]]&Zip=[[Zip]]&Subject=[[Letter_Subject]]&govEMail=[[Letter_Content]]
Be aware that people using web forms may make a point of changing them from time to time to defeat third-party submissions -- you may need to revisit the target from time to time to keep it updated.
There are often alternatives to web form processing, and you might want to consider them:
*Fax instead of e-mail the messages (note that this involves an additional cost).
*Make your own e-mail address, or one in your organization, the target address for your custom recipient; collect and separately deliver (by hand, fax, mail, courier, or whatever is appropriate) the messages.
*Use the petition tool instead.
*Rather than sending only to the principal, find an aide, assistant, partner or similar entity that does have available contact information and target that.
The DemocracyInAction event tool allows supporters and administrators the ability to create and manage events or meetups, and allows other supporters to then take part in those events. Supporters can enter information about where and when an event will occur, as well as how many people they wish to attend, and many other options. Web site users can then search for events in their state, or events within a set number of miles of their Zip code, and sign up to attend.
The host of the event is able to look at who is attending their events, and email them directly. There are also features to track event attendance, donations at the event, associated information for the event such as talking points, and more.
The Event tool is tied in with the DemocracyInAction Email Blast, so that administrators can target emails based on who has (or who has not!) attended an event. In addition, the Event tool has links with the Chapter module, so that a national organization with local chapters can have each chapter set up their own events, and track supporter attendence.
Yes, in the headquarters you have the ability to delete blog entries. Select Web Features->Edit Blog and choose the blog. You'll see a list of blog entries, choose one and you'll see a list of comments for that entry.
You cannot review a blog entry before it has been entered, and this is generally a bad idea anyway. People get freaked out if their blog entry doesn't show up right away, and it's seems a little like Big Brother to tell them it must be reviewed for content first. But you can still remove bad entries.
The "redirect path" is the web page of where you want to direct the user after they signup/donate/take action, etc. It is just the URL Address of the web page, listed in the Address bar of your web browser)
Relative URL's usually work, but depending on the architecture of your site, they may not, so fully qualified URL's (i.e. http:....../xxx.html) are recommended
Dreamweaver and other graphical interfaces excellent for managing templates, look and feel, and other graphical elements of a website. However, as an organization grows, handling straight HTML files quickly gets out of hand and confusing.
Using an online content management system provides many advantages to the growing organization. Probably most importantly it allows the people designing the website and the people entering the data to do so independently, so that changes to the design can be done quickly and don't affect the content, and vice versa. In addition, a content management system allows easier content organization and searching through past campaigns.
Content management systems are most useful for pages that have the same look and feel, but just different content. A Newsroom is a perfect example -- each news item has it's own data, but most of it is a very consistent format -- title, source, news, author, date, etc.
You do lose some functionality through a content management system-- namely the ability for any page to be completely customized and independent from every other page. But the advantages offered generally outweigh that loss of control as an organization grows.
We integrate directly with Dreamweaver so people are able to choose whichever solution suits their organization's needs.
DemocracyInAction supports a URL encoding method that removes the query string from a url, thereby making it easier for search engines to store and index the page.
Yes, you can send out multiple trigger emails, just enter multiple comma delimited email addresses in the Email field.
Triggers have access to all the information that was supplied in the form that triggered the trigger (huh?). A trigger email is generally sent when a form is submitted, and the values of the inputs in that form are used to populate the trigger.
NOTE: Triggers have DIFFERENT merge fields than Email Blasts! However, the syntax is the same: [[mergeField]]
Yes! Chapters are no more than a loose grouping of supporters, they still belong to the main organization. Chapters can signup and remove supporters, and be deleted, without affecting the underlying supporter base. You?ll just have to add them to the new chapter by hand.
Usually this happens when no subject has been entered for the Tell a Friend section. Add a subject and give it a try!
When you write a trigger, you can use the syntax:
[[nameOfParameter]]
to replace in the values in the list below. For example,
"[[First_Name]] signed up for [[Interests]]."
would become
"Joseph signed up for Canvass & Recruit; Prepare Mailings; Distribute Signs; Do Election Day Activities"
Note the replacement of the fields -- we call them Merge Fields
or another example:
"Someone who lives in [[City]] signed up with email [[Email]]"
would become
"Someone who lives in Red Bank signed up with email JBal640@AOL.com"
in the email they receive.
To get a list of available fields, click the Append All Values button in the trigger, and the first trigger you get will have all the available parameters listed.
A questionnaire is a Web Feature page that you can create to ask questions of your supporters online. It ties directly in with your custom fields, so your first step in creating a questionnaire is always to define some Custom Fields where the answers to the questionnaire will go. So, for example, if you wanted to ask someone who they voted for in 2000, you would create a Custom Field with that question, then create a Questionnaire page, and choose that question from the drop down list. You can create as many questions as you have Custom Fields, and the data will go into the supporter's entry in the database. As always, we use the email address to determine where to put data for people who are already in the database.
A survey is just a quick anonymous poll of people who visit your website -- similar to the QuickPolls you see on a lot of sites. It does not record who votes for what -- use the Questionnaire for that
Add the following code to your website
<form action="http://demaction.org/dia/api/process.jsp">
<input type=hidden name="org" value="##">
<input type=hidden name="table" value="supporter">
<input name="Email" value="">
<input type=hidden name="redirect" value="http://pagetogoto.com/">
<input type=submit>
</form>
and replace the ## with your organization number , and the Redirect value with the page people go to when they're done signing up -
DemocracyInAction.org provides a simple RSS parser that can be dropped into any .jsp page (note -- templates will not process this directive). Here is an example chunk of code to accomplish this
<jsp:include page="/api/readRSS.jsp" flush="true" >
<jsp:param name="url" value="http://www.votersunite.org/news-rss/index.xml" />
<jsp:param name="max" value="10" />
</jsp:include>
It allows campaign managers to put conditional website or email content up based on group membership or state membership :
i.e. People in the Northeast get a content block that talks about Northeast issues, whereas people in Florida get Florida issues.
No -- there are many different ways to interact with the DiA system, and modify the url of the resulting
Option 1. The easiest way is to use the default generated pages. Having them hosted on our server is usually the easiest way -- that way y