Checklist: When a Contact is marked as "deceased"

Here's a discussion question that came up in our internal company Chatter today:

"How do clients tend to handle the marking of a deceased patron in a household when things like the Account Name, Salutations, Address Names, etc need to get updated. Workflow off the checkbox?"

We started thinking about this, and decided that a hybrid approach is the best. There are a few things that should happen automatically right away if a Contact is marked as "deceased" -- like checking "Do Not Mail" box, and changing their Email Status to "Opt-out' -- but for other things like Account Name and Salutation changes at the household level, it's probably a better idea for a human to do the work, to make sure it's right and that it's handled sensitively.

Here's a terrible example that one of our coworkers shared about what can happen if you're not handling this well:

"My friend James' Mother passed away last year, and this was the letter he received in the mail. Not only is the letter wrong, but it's causing all sorts of confusion and he'll have to call them and get it all straightened out."

"dear james, we're sorry you're dead"

But, okay, does that mean you need to train your entire staff on how to make the correct changes to fields on a record when you're checking the "deceased" box? Maybe not -- it could be that the person finding out about the deceased-ness and marking the record isn't necessarily a person who needs to be super-trained on a whole cascading list of other things to do.

Instead, let's create a workflow that does those things we mentioned above, but that also creates a task or series of tasks for particular staff members to take care of the name fields, and perhaps send a condolence card, depending on the relationship to the deceased person.

Overall, the takeaway here is: When you're thinking about new workflows for your organization, consider the difference between automatic changes that can happen in the background versus things where you want an actual human to use their brain… but don't overlook the benefit of a reminder task for the latter! Create a list of the things that should happen, assign it to the right person, and you'll be in the clear.

"But I *HAVE* already given!" -- Targeting in Fundraising Campaigns

Have you ever gotten an email (or letter) that sounds like this?

"If you've already given, we thank you."

"please forgive this email"

These are both real emails that we've received from arts organizations in the last few years. We get what they're trying to do here… but it's really not working.

"IF" we've already given?! Why don't you know whether or not we've given? If I have in fact made a donation to your organization this year, now I feel like it was a waste of time -- you don't even know that it happened, so it couldn't have been that valuable. And if I haven't made a donation yet, you're already indicating to me that maybe I shouldn't bother.

The good news is that PatronManager/Salesforce makes it easy to run reports that let you avoid having to use this awkward phrasing.

Let's say you want to send out an email message to your entire list asking them to contribute to the year-end fundraising campaign, but you want to make sure to send an appropriate message to each of them.

For this example, we've identified four groups of people:

• People who have already given to this exact campaign.
• People who have donated at all within the last 2-3 months.
• People who are major donors or prospects who need a more careful/deliberate solicitation plan.
• Everyone else.

So how do we turn that into targeted solicitation lists?

Here's how we did it:

• Start from an Accounts & Contacts report
• Make sure it has the two obvious contact filters on it that we're always going to use for email campaigns: "Email not equal to [blank]" and "Email Status equals Confirmed Opt-In"
• Exclude people who have already given to this exact campaign -- add a cross filter for "Contacts without Donations, where Primary Campaign Source equals Year-End Campaign 2015"
• Exclude people who have given within the last 2 months add a cross filter for "Contacts without Donations where Close Date is greater than 9/1/2015)

This is what we have so far:

• The last filter we want to add is one that will exclude people who are major donors or prospects -- this piece is more likely to vary based on the specific practices of your organization. (You might filter on a "Major Donor" field on the Contact or Account object directly… or on a different campaign where you're collecting prospects… or on people who have given any donations of a certain high amount… or perhaps against WealthEngine data… and so on.)

Now that all those filters are in place, we have our "Everyone Else" group, and we're ready to send them our main general solicitation email for this campaign.

And the great part is that we've also made it easy to send a targeted message to each of the other three groups, if we feel it's appropriate. We'll just take one of those filters at a time, "flip" it to give us the opposite result, keep the other filters there… and probably add a new filter to exclude everyone we just sent to, for good measure.

Here's an example of what you might say to someone who already gave this year, but who you want to make sure is aware of the current campaign:

this is why

(You might even want to explicitly suggest that they tell their friends!)

Obviously this same concept works for print mailings, not just email (you'll just filter on mailing address information instead of the email fields).

And this whole concept holds true for ticket sales too, not just fundraising! In our experience, most organizations already usually try to follow this approach in their marketing efforts, running reports to exclude current ticket-holders from emails advertising that particular show -- so this is just an encouragement to think about your fundraising campaigns in the same way.