Author Topic: Comments on test mailings, late binding and other suggestions. (Read 940 times)

majortom · January 06, 2012, 04:26:00 am

Having used CiviMail for several years, it is great to realize how much it has improved. Over the last few mailings I have sent, I have been thinking of things that would improve it and its workflow. Here is my list of suggestions (I would be happy to contribute to a Make it Happen to implement any or all of these changes):

Comments for test mailings - It has been previously suggested that the send test message button be moved to the compose window. I think that adding the ability to prefix the mailing with comment (e.g. "Please review and forward your comments by tonight.") so that the test recipients know what is being requested of them. I find that every time I send a test message, I have to follow it with another message that explains what I would like the test recipients to do, and the time frame in which I need it done.
Late binding - Currently, when a mailing's recipients are selected when the mailing is scheduled. This means that mailings only go to those people who matched the criteria when the mailing was created, not when it is being sent. For example a reminder message sent to registered volunteers would only be sent to those who had registered when it was scheduled, not all those who had registered since.
Recurring mailings - With late binding, another option becomes useful - the ability to create a recurring mailing. A mailing to remind all registered volunteers to file their reports could be sent every Friday, or a reminder for the monthly bowling night could go out the 3rd Thursday.
Auto-resend - A special case of recurring mailings would be used to have a mailing sent several times to its designated recipients (excluding those who had already received it). This could be used to send directions to an event location to those who had already registered for the event. That message could be scheduled to run every day from the day registration opens until the event (a bonus would allow a change in frequency for the same message - run once a week when registration opens, then once a day starting one week before the event, and finally once an hour on the day before the event.

With late binding, some of these features could easily be supported from Drupal's rules module, although that would limit their reach.

Thanks to all who have contributed to CiviMail and to CiviCRM in general.

Happy New Year.

kengle3 · January 16, 2012, 09:27:44 am

CiviMail has been great for our group, but one of the things we could really use is the late binding feature. We would like to set up our mail well in advance, but since group membership is always fluctuating, what we have to do is set up the mailings, and then just before we send them add the members. If the recipients were decided when the mailing was actually sent, we wouldn't have to worry about new members being left out of emails for weeks to months at a time.

The Auto Resend would also be a really useful feature for us, because we like to minimize the amount of manual labor in contacting our participants. Currently when one of our events is coming up, we have to resend the same email several times to make sure that people who sign up late get it. First, we send out an email to our registered participants roughly two weeks in advance. However, we still have people who register in the time between that original email and our event. This means that we have to go back into CiviMail several times in the days before our event and resend it to all participants who have not yet been sent a copy of the original mail. Making it so that we could set a CiviMail mailing to automatically send to these last minute registrations would give us one less thing to worry about for our events.

Both of these things lead me to add a suggestion to those already made that would really be a big thing if the auto-resend or recurring e-mail features were added, and that is aggregated mailing reports. Currently, when we resend the same email many times before an event, we end up with many reports on what is essentially the same message. It would be nice to not see 104 entries for "Weekly Blood Drive volunteers" but instead 1 that aggregated all that information (one would probably still like to be able to look at the individual runs).

Donald Lobo · January 16, 2012, 10:12:12 am

few thougts and comments:

1. For an MIH, we need a couple of seed sponsors. At a rough guess assuming we want to invest 75-100 hours in the below civimail improvements, we'd like to have some seed sponsors for 40-50 hours. If folks want to see this happen, please contact us via email

2. With regard to aggregated reporting, check the mail reports under CiviReport (in 3.3 and later).

http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/report/list?reset=1

(note that there are no mailing on drupal.demo right now and hence u dont see the mailing multi-select)

3. The auto-resend for events is basically the "Scheduled Reminders for Events" functionality in 4.1 (not yet documented)

http://sandbox.drupal.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/scheduleReminders?reset=1

4. We used to do late binding but as civi got more complicated (multi-site, ACL permissions, parent <-> child etc) it became a lot more difficult to find the exact set of contacts that the user had permission. i.e. the cron job would need to switch to the "user who created/scheduled" the email, figure out the set of contacts and then send the mailing. Not hard but some amount of new code needed. I dont think this is a trivial project

lobo

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Author Topic: Comments on test mailings, late binding and other suggestions. (Read 940 times)

majortom

Comments on test mailings, late binding and other suggestions.

kengle3

Re: Comments on test mailings, late binding and other suggestions.

Donald Lobo

Re: Comments on test mailings, late binding and other suggestions.