The purpose for an Email Distribution through Big River is send a targeted message to a targeted group and be able to do that over and over again.
This solution will walk you through how easy it is to create an email blast for your organization to get your messages out.
First thing you will need to do is click the Email tab on the left of your screen.
Since this is your first time (or maybe not), will see something like this above your emails you've sent:
This information above shows you industry standard information for non-profit around the country and could vary for each organization. The point of this is to see how your emails are doing once you've sent them to better understand how to make them better, or keep them as is. It will show you the percentage of delivery, Open Rate, Clicks, Bounces, Complaints and Opt-Outs.
There is also a box that will show you the precise amount of each of these categories in numeric form:
So how do you create the email blast? Here are the steps to make that work:
1. Click New Email Distribution
2. A box will pop up asking you to select who the email is from, so select the one you want to use. You can change the "from name" to whatever you want it to be. The "From Address" will never change because it's be pre-approved by Big River when your account was set up. The reply-To Name and Reply-To Address do not need to have anything in unless you want the reply-to address to be different than the "From Address":
3. The next thing you are going to want to do is choose which email blast you want to create. Since this is your first one, you'll want to 'Import a list from a file" or "Create a new list - advanced":
To import emails from an Excel file, select the "Import a list from a file" option, then select the "Select File..." button and select your file. The file should include only email addresses in the first column. Big River will report any errors in the email file. If there are not errors, you will be able to select the "Edit Message" button to continue.
For "Create a new list - advanced" the default list is all the emails in your Account. Other options include all emails from one or more segments, forms or events.
4. Once you've selected your list, select "Edit Message". In this area, you can edit and create the message you are looking to send to a particular group. If this is your first message, then you'll want to hit create a new message. You can do everything in this messaging tool that you would in any of Big River's messaging to your fundraiser's or workplace campaigns. Make sure you also add a subject in for your message in the Subject Line. In our other solutions, we will discuss previous emails and make a copy of a past email. These are great ways to reuse messaging without having to create new ones:
5. Once you've created the message you like, go ahead and save that work. You will then be asked to save the list to your account. Once you've completed that, you'll now be sent to Edit:
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6. The last thing to do at this point is to schedule the email. Very simply click schedule email for the date you want and hit the save button. Once that happens, your email will automatically turn to scheduled once you completed the save.
That's the basics of putting together an email distribution list and the beauty of this is that you can now use it over and over again in the future to your donor base.