After the Mailing - Tracking Results
Welcome back to our series discussing best practices for using Marketing Efforts in Blackbaud CRM™. If you missed the first three parts of our series, be sure to check those posts out here:
In part four, we focus on best practices for tracking results after your marketing effort has been activated.
Refreshing Marketing Efforts Results
You can refresh results within your activated marketing efforts by clicking Refresh effort on the taskbar. This will search for new gifts that have been tied to the appeal and finder numbers in your effort. This isn't an excellent solution when you have hundreds or thousands of efforts.
One way to make the process more efficient than individually refreshing each effort is to set up a marketing effort refresh queue. You can add a job schedule to run this every night. The downside is that each time you activate a new marketing effort, you will have to remember to add that marketing effort to the queue manually. And, if you have a lot of efforts, the process can run for a long time.
BrightVine has built a free tool to address this two-fold problem. We've developed a custom process that automatically refreshes Marketing Efforts only when there is new revenue associated with that effort. This eliminates the need to add efforts to a queue manually, and significantly improves processing times. If you'd like this free tool, please email us.
Marketing Effort Reports
There are many out-of-the-box reports in Blackbaud CRM™ that can help you to analyze the effectiveness of your Marketing Efforts. Here are a few we recommend:
Appeal Performance Report
The Appeal Performance report helps you understand the effectiveness of your appeals. You can view information about a single appeal or multiple appeals, and filter the report by appeal category, revenue date, etc. You can also break out the results by designations generate charts to represent the comparison of multiple appeals.
Marketing Revenue Report
The Marketing Revenue report allows you to see a breakdown of the number of gifts and dollars that a marketing effort has generated for your organization. TIP: a Marketing Effort must be activated to run this report.
The report tracks responses over a date range and frequency that you define in the parameters of the report, which can be helpful when analyzing trends related to response times, etc. Under the Period totals, the report displays revenue for the date range you select. Under Totals to Date, it displays revenue up to and including the date range. This allows you to compare totals for the period to the revenue before the period.
In addition to a grid sorted by column, the report also includes line charts for Number of Gifts by Period and Revenue by Period.
Marketing Exclusions Report
The Marketing exclusions report can be beneficial during the set up of your marketing effort. Once you have calculated segment counts, you will be able to run the report and check how many constituents were excluded from the effort and why. It also provides a break down of exclusion counts for each individual segment in the effort.
If you have a question about why a particular constituent is not included in the effort, this report offers the ability to check for exclusions at a granular level. Simply click the Excel/CSV icons, and a list with each constituent that was excluded will download to your computer. The file contains the constituent name, the segment they were excluded from, and the reason for their exclusion. For example: solicit code, exclusion selection, included in a previous segment, etc.
Source Analysis Rules (SAR)
Have you ever used the Source Analysis Rules? Not sure what they do? If you ever wondered why a constituent was included in a mailing or what their giving status was when the effort was pulled, the Source Analysis Rules tell you just that. SARs are a snapshot of a donor's traits at a specific time, captured from Smart Fields that already exist in Blackbaud CRM™.
To start getting SAR results, be sure to check the box when you are ready to activate a Marketing Effort. The system will take a snapshot at the time of activation. This way, you can look back and pinpoint which mailing changed that donors loyalty value, triggered another gift, etc.
Below are the out-of-the-box SAR fields that are set up in Blackbaud CRM™:
Constituent Years on File
Constituent Life Gifts (Count)
Constituent Life Giving ($$)
Constituent Single Gift Consecutive Years
Constituent Loyalty value
There are several options for how you can analyze the Source Analysis Rules that you have captured.
Source Analysis Report
The Source Analysis Response report provides detailed information about how SARs perform across marketing efforts.
Query Results
Another way to dive into and analyze Source Analysis Rules is by creating queries. Check out this blog post for some ideas on different queries that you can build to look at Source Analysis Rules.
We hope you've enjoyed our four-part series on Marketing Effort best practices in Blackbaud CRM™. Hopefully, you've picked up some helpful tips and tricks to get the most out of your Marketing Effort configuration and set up. Let us know how you're using Marketing Efforts