We added a single rich text field to the contact called Calls to Action. It is intended to be merged into outbound marketing communications. The rich text field was made available to custom report types. It is set by a new flow called SYM Contact Next Recommendations.
The flow is run weekly (Sunday morning early) by Mass Action Scheduler on all contacts that have a non-empty Newsletter string (i.e., all subscribers). The source is SOQL with query: SELECT ID FROM Contact WHERE Newsletters__c !=’’. The batch size is 80 (reduced from 100 after one batch failed). Note that many other Mass Action Schedule batches run Sunday morning as well as some NPSP processes perhaps. At the time of launch, that means we now have 5400 customized and encouraging calls to action. Note that this type of insertion is not supported due to size by Vertical Response. We are currently limited to sending Mass Mails from Salesforce, List Mails (200 limit) or via Apsona mail merge feature (5000 limit). These solutions are not ideal for newsletters but can be made to work in the interim while we search for a better solution. We have no solution for our largest mailing list (quarterly newsletter) except two-day segmentation.
Examples of the output include:
These outputs are formed by looking for program records related to each of the areas of in-kind donation, volunteerism, soft-donation stewardship, and account direct donations. The call to action text is bulleted and intended to be surrounded by a <ul></ul> in the email document. Many of the calls include one of three types as depicted the sample below for donor: (a) an initial call to action if there is no history; (b) a reference to the most recent activity and gives a call for how to get others involved if the action is recent; or (c) a call to return to an activity it it’s been a while.
The resulting bullet item is formatted by text templates in the flow as follows for relatively easy updating:
Some records don’t trigger text always such as the subscriber logic shown below. This could be enhanced to follow the pattern more rigorously if desired. It is noted that the current flow does NOT make use of referral. It is an oversight and should be corrected since referring people to us is a huge impact.
The flow has an input to identify the contact ID. It has another input which defaults to true which can be overridden to not save the output. The entire flow is lengthy but just a string of sections each of which gets the program records, made a 2 or 3-way decision to set the CTA text from the template, merging in the relevant recent record if applicable. The last thing the flow does, it add all the calls together. The calls to put in order perceived to be most useful today but they could easily be rearranged in the final step with “adds” them all together. If the flow were used in another way, each of those individual calls to action are available as output variables from the flow.
