Understanding Coaching Emails

You can send TeamRaiser coaching emails that contain content to help inspire and guide other volunteer fundraisers to be successful in raising funds for your organization or donors to give the most possible. You can also target groups that were created by the event, such as participants created by an upload, or added to the event by an event administrator, such as high achievers.

For participants, you can include information about steps to take as well as tips to increase their fund raising potential. For donors, you can appeal to them by inserting components about event statistics, such as the amount of money raised towards the current goal or spurring on a friendly rivalry by showing the top ten participants who have raised the most money.

If the Returning Teams option is enabled in the Advanced Event options, you can create and send coaching emails to past participants and donors. You can use the coaching emails to announce registration and invite previous participants to return as well as include special offers, like Early Bird registration discounts. You can also target past donors to make them aware of the new event season.

If you resend a coaching email, it is sent to only the people who did not receive it the first time. For example, you can resend a coaching email that targetted particpants of the current event to be sure it is sent to all participants who have registered since the last time the message was sent.

After sending a coaching email, you can review the delivery statistics to monitor and determine such important aspects, like how many of the recipients opened it and how many clicked the links in it.

Coaching emails have the following phases:

• Building the message
• Configuring its delivery
• Monitoring the delivery and actions taken on it

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Building Your Coaching Email Message

Emails that you build, or start to build, are stored in the Coaching Emails Message List. They are stored in the Draft status until they are approved for delivery. You can perform the usual editing actions (Edit, Copy, Delete, Preview, and Archive) on your message when its in the Draft Status. You can exit at any point and the message will remain in Draft. After an email has been scheduled for delivery or sent, you can return it to the Draft state to edit it and make changes.

When you build a message, you supply the basic details and then define the message envelope that identifies to the recipient who has sent the email and why. To increase the likelihood that recipients will read your coaching email, you can make the From area more appealing than just a name or email address. For example, you could put a descriptive term about your position, such as Recruitment Coordinator or Successful Fundraising Peer. The subject should also be compelling enough that the recipient will want to open the email when they get it.

You may also be able to select an appropriate stationery that defines the elements displayed in the borders around the actual message content. Built in the Stationery area, these elements can include inspirational links or sayings, images, colors, and so on. The elements can be laid out in the top, bottom, right, and left border or combinations of these options depending on the layout.

For the HTML content, you can create your content directly in the Content Editor area or paste it in from a copied source (be careful when copying in HTML-formatted source or source with coding in it). If toolbars display at the top of the content area, you can format text fonts, sizes, and colors; use bulleted or numbered lists; insert pictures; and so on to make a more appealing email. Make sure you save your content as you work with it so that you do not lose it.

An unsubscribe link is automatically inserted in the footer of each coaching email to enable recipients to opt-out of receiving any additional TeamRaiser Coaching Emails without opting-out from all email from your site. As coaching emails are sent, any member of the target audience who has previously opted out from receiving coaching or site emails does not receive the email.

Once you have set up the envelope and added your content, you can run your email through a special SPAM checker to help avoid having it rejected by the popular email services, like Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, and so on. You can also send yourself the email to be sure it looks appropriate. If your organization has test email accounts to each of the popular email services, you can send it to each account to be sure it looks good in all services.

This may involve saving the message at this point, moving away from this page, and coming back to make changes to the envelope or content. You can locate the message in the Message List and click Edit to make your changes.

When you have finished building and testing your message, you can approve it to move it to the Approved Status so its delivery is ready for configuration or click the Finish button to leave it in its Draft state so it can be edited or approved later.

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Configuring the Delivery of Your Coaching Email

The delivery setup starts by selecting the target audience type. You can select participants, donors, or TeamRaiser groups that have been automatically created by the event or manually added to the Coaching Email Delivery Groups.

If you select:

• Participants in the current event, before getting to the Delivery Details page, you:
  • Will select the Participation Types who should receive the message
  • Can optionally set filters based on:
    • Registration information, such as only participants who did not participate in the previous event or who registered online as well as who registered between certain dates
    • Additional donation, email, and unconfirmed gift information
    • Team membership and company affiliation
• Participants from the previous event (available when the Returning Teams feature is enabled), before getting to the Delivery Details page, you:
  • Will add the Participation Types who should receive the message
  • Will select the appropriate returning teams filter (all participants from the previous event, only those who were on teams that have not yet registered for this event, or only the captains of teams that have not yet registered)
• Donors to the current event, you will go right to the Delivery Details page
• Donors of the previous event (available when the Returning Teams feature is enabled), you will go right to the Delivery Details page
• Groups created from this event, you will add the appropriate groups and then go on to the Delivery Details page

From the Delivery Details page, you can send your email to the queue immediately or you can schedule the date and time on which you want to send it to the queue. (Note that the actual sending of email from the queue is based on certain tasks and business processes configured for the organization and immediate often means at the next available window of opportunity based on those rules.)

From this page, you can also Set up Do Not Email groups to filter out additional audience members. For example, if the target audience is set to current event participants and a specific group of participants already had the information, you could select the group as a Do Not Email group to avoid sending them the notice.

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Monitoring and Working with Your Coaching Email After Delivery

After the coaching email is in the queue, the message displays in the Delivery List as well as the Message List.

You cannot edit a message to make changes unless you return it to the draft status in the Message List using the Return to Draft action. Note that you do not need to edit the message to change the audience or filters if you simply need to resend the message to catch any new people who meet the audience filtering criteria. The Resend action available in the Delivery List automatically filters out anyone who has already been sent the email.

From the Message List, you can perform the typical actions, such as preview the content of the sent (or scheduled to be sent) message, copy the message to use as a model, or store it in the archives to make your list shorter (if the Show Archived Coaching Email Messages checkbox is not enabled). You can also delete a message to remove it completely from the database, but note that you cannot recover a deleted message.

From the Delivery List, for messages in the Sent status, you can:

• Review the delivery information to:
  • Determine when the message was sent, the number of recipients that received the delivery as well as the number of delivery failures, the number of recipients who opened it, who clicked the actionable link in it, and so on
  • Run the Delivery Recipient Report (from the Related Actions) to determine the names and email addresses to which this message was delivered and to add the recipients to a new or existing group.
• Resend the message to anyone who may not have gotten it the last time it was sent (for example, participants who have registered since the last-sent date, donors who have made another donation, a newly uploaded group, and so on)
• Archive the delivery statistics to make the list shorter (if the Show Archived Deliveries checkbox is not enabled)
• Restore an archived delivery (if the Show Archived Deliveries checkbox is enabled) to review statistics

For messages in the Partially Configured or Not Sent status, you can Begin Delivery configuration to set up, or edit, your audience, filters, delivery options, schedule, and so on as described in Configuring Delivery of Your Coaching Email above as well as archive the delivery at this point to remove it from the list.

If an administrator has created reports that you can view and run, you can display them from the Reports area.

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