Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

I wanted to outline one possible strategy for deciding which tool to use to send mail - many of our noprofits colleagues have THREE ways they can reach out to their stakeholders:

1. Sending from Outlook (or whatever else they use for a regular mail tool)
2. Sending from Vertical Response
3. Sending directly from Salesforce

All three of those tools have different layers/levels of integration - so it can be hard to figure out what tool to use. Here’s my recommendation:

• If the mail you are going to send is to a GROUP of people (say 20 or more) - I think you should use Vertical Response. They’ll handle spam laws and so on - and you can track your open rates and so on back in Salesforce.
• If the mail you are going to send is internal (say, to your co-workers) - I think you should send from your normal mail client - you probably don’t need a record of that correspondence in your CRM. Imagine the clutter if every note I sent to my team was recorded in Salesforce!
• If the mail you are going to send has information that your agency needs to know (this is the "hit by the bus" rule) and is going to a single person - then you should send it directly from Salesforce. That captures that knowledge for your agency, rather than silo it in your sent mail (or worse) in your brain. For instance - inviting a key stakeholder to a meeting, someone to join the board, or other information that your team may need to use.
• And if the mail you are going to send is incidental - say - inviting a board member to lunch, scheduling a coffee meeting, or something of that nature - you should send with your regular email tool.

It’s pretty likely that under any of these circumstances - your work won’t be finished! After that meeting, or after getting a response to that email - you might need to GO BACK to Salesforce to create an activity to record what happened! That casual coffee meeting might have generated a grant opportunity, your team might have mentioned a possible donor that you should contact, and your bulk email via Vertical Response probably generated follow up, too.

It’s easier by far to solve the "what email?" question with brain power, rather than with code. Despite the huge gains in technology - your brain can make that choice much more quickly and affordably than any code we could create - so - put your brain to work and create some protocol that suits YOUR agency!