You asked for better communication between those involved in your campaign…
and now you shall receive.
Introducing, brand new for September 2022, the Communication Centre! This is your one-stop messenger for communicating with your campaign team, fundraisers, and/or supporters.
Part 1: Getting there and general overview #
The Communication Centre lives in the sidebar menu of any campaign, as communication is generally campaign-specific:
For email, the ‘Sender’ for the template will be whichever platform you are using (FundRazr, Crowdfundr, CoCoPay, Petfundr).
For the Activity Feed, the message will post to the feed by whichever user profile initiated it:
Part 2: How to message specific groups #
This new feature allows you to send messages to your supporters, campaign team members, fundraisers (sub-campaign owners), OR all of these groups at once!
STEP 1 – Click ‘Communications’ in the sidebar menu.
STEP 2 – Under ‘Compose’ in the new sidebar menu, you’ll see the message form. Click ‘Add recipients’ to see the options.
STEP 3 – Choose who you want to send the message to, then click ‘Confirm.’
Note: there must be at least one recipient. If there isn’t, the ‘Confirm’ button will not work.
STEP 4 – Write your message, then choose ‘Save,’ ‘Discard,’ ‘Preview,’ or ‘Send’ (bottom-right corner).
Note: If you choose ‘Save,’ your message will sit in the ‘Draft’ section of your sidebar menu.
Part 3: How to schedule communications. #
If you want a message to send at a future time, there’s an easy way to do it!
STEP 1 – In the ‘Compose’ section of the Communications menu (see Part 1), click ‘Schedule’ at the bottom left side of the message.
STEP 2 – Choose the day and time you wish, then click ‘Set.’
Note: the system will automatically follow whatever time zone you are in.
STEP 3 – Click ‘Schedule,’ which now replaces ‘Send’ in the bottom right corner:
Part 4: Adding picture and video #
This part is incredibly easy!
Directly above the ‘Schedule’ option (as discussed in Part 3) is ‘Attachments.’ Click here to upload a picture or video from your computer or a video from YouTube or Vimeo.
Part 5: Importing contacts #
This is the most important step in getting the word about your campaign out to the world!
Importing contacts will send a message from the platform you are using to the email addresses you upload. These contacts are automatically ‘subscribed’ to this campaign, and they will receive two types of email notifications:
- Weekly Digest emails – Contain information about activity on all campaigns they’ve been imported into. If you import someone into your campaign and someone else imports the same person into their campaign, the weekly digest email will contain information about both campaigns.
- Story Update emails – Contain the Story update for the campaign(s) they have been imported into. Contacts will receive an email whenever you post a Story update on your campaign.
Here is an example of the initial email they’ll receive:
Important Notes regarding uploading contacts:
- You may NOT upload purchased email lists. These lists often come with spam reports because recipients will likely not recognize the platform it is associated with. Campaigns that upload these types of lists will be denied and removed.
- Your lists must be of high quality! This means that all recipients must have consented to have their email address used for campaign updates and/or messages from your group. If you were to upload your ENTIRE email contact list onto your campaign, you would risk some being undeliverable. Undeliverable mail, or delivered mail that a contact has reported as ‘spam,’ hurts both your and ConnectionPoint’s email reputation score. Your campaign might be removed if you upload a poor-quality list that results in many of these reports.
Here are the items that ConnectionPoint filters automatically:
- The contacts you import are stored on the Followers page of your campaign and are not added to our general marketing emails.
- We filter out any contacts that have a no-reply email address (for example, notifications@example.com)
- Contacts that previously unsubscribed from the campaign won’t be re-added.
- Contacts that unsubscribed from all platform emails in the past won’t be added again.
- Contacts that contain a verifiably invalid email address won’t be added.
STEP 1 – When in the Communications Centre, click ‘Contacts’ in the sidebar.
STEP 2 – Click ‘Import contacts.
STEP 3 – Select an email client.
Cloudsponge powers our Import Contacts feature. Your email client will ask you to accept permissions before using the feature. The example below shows you how Gmail’s permissions page looks.
** With Outlook, you can upload your contacts from a CSV file.**
- Format your CSV file with these three required fields for the upload to work:
- First Name,
- Last Name,
- Email address.
- Once you have the file formatted properly – Click the Outlook option – then “Upload” your file.
**A comma MUST separate manual entries!**
STEP 4 – Customize the message.
Once you’ve uploaded or manually typed in at least one email address, you will see the option to customize a message appear.
STEP 5 – Preview email.
STEP 6 – Import
EXTRA STEP – Deleting contacts.
Each contact will have an ‘X’ to the right of their name, which can be used to remove them from this list:
Please note: Personal campaigns have a 100-contact limit. Removing a previously imported email will still count against this limit.
To promote your campaign to a larger subscriber base, we suggest you send out a separate email through your existing email channels. Learn about how to share your campaign here.
Part 6: Viewing and duplicating past messages #
You can view an old message in the ‘History’ section of the Communications Centre’s sidebar menu. Then you may ‘Copy’ or duplicate a message if you want to send it again (or with minor changes) to another recipient.
STEP 1 – Click ‘History’ in the Communications Centre sidebar menu.
STEP 2 – Click ‘Copy’ beside the message in question.
That’s it! You’ll open up a direct copy of the original message.
