This month we’re giving away a simple configuration that delivers a few small but powerful and helpful UI changes to the Blackbaud CRM™ Marketing Effort screens.

Change 1: Strategic Button Placement

Ever notice how close the “Calculate Segment Counts” and “Activate Marketing Effort” buttons are to one another?

These are two very powerful buttons that do drastically different things. One will refresh your segments with newly qualified members, and remove those who are now disqualified. While the other will lock in all aspects of the marketing effort and write the communication back to all constituent records.

For obvious reasons, you would not want to mix these up. Activation before any necessary changes to your segments are completed would lock out your ability to further refine your effort. On the flip-side, re-calculating segment counts when you intended to activate could be equally problematic, especially if you’ve already provided the exported mail file to your vendor or dropped the mailing, as finder numbers may be reassigned as people move in and out of various segments.

For these reasons, we’ve shifted the buttons to have a little more breathing room! And to give you a little more peace of mind as you go about your marketing effort tasks.

Change 2: Hide potentially problematic shortcuts

To complement the above change, we hid the same “Calculate segment counts” and “Activate” buttons from the in-row task menu shown below.

While we’re generally all for less clicks, this is a scenario where extra caution is needed. As such, we believe clicking through to the marketing effort record itself before those actions can be taken (and using the new button placement from Change 1) is a worthwhile step which this change helps enforce. If you like the other changes mentioned in this post but aren’t sure you want to hide these buttons, just let us know and this can be kept visible.

Change 3: Actionable Activation List

Another way to prevent unintended changes to your approved and in flight marketing efforts is to stay on top of activating them. Surprisingly there is often a lag, and during that lag unintentional changes are always a risk.

Because most high volume direct marketing organizations are often managing the lifecycle of numerous efforts at a time, it is easy to see how activation can get left behind. But we’ve added a legend to the marketing efforts data list to easily highlight all those efforts where the launch date has past, yet activation has not yet occurred. With our legend, these ready to be activated efforts are highlighted in red rather than blending in with the crowd, giving you a clear reminder that they should be actioned so that you can both prevent mistakes, and start watching the dollars roll in!

Reach out today to get these free, upgrade friendly configuration changes. Have more questions about managing your Marketing program in Blackbaud CRM™? Our team can help. Just connect with us and we'll be happy to continue the conversation!