Name: End of Year Call to Actions
Uploaded: 2025-11-12T19:31:08.624Z
Duration: 57 min 36 s
Description: End of Year Call to Actions

Transcript for "End of Year Call to Actions": Hello, everybody. Welcome to this, this month's session here. Hard to believe we are already in November. And as, Addie put into the, into our chat here, yes, before long, it's gonna be, it's gonna be Christmas time. I actually thought about buying some candy canes yesterday at the store. But, yes. Hello, everybody. Welcome. This month, we are going to be talking about end of year, what I'm going to refer to as call to actions. Now I'll talk a little bit more about what I mean about that exactly, momentarily, but, wanted to this is definitely the time of year to be considering this, especially as we are nearing the, the Thanksgiving time here in The United States and of course as you are kind of making your final push towards the end of the year. And I wanted to make sure that I provide you with some of this really good, you know, some some past information that I've that I used to present many moons ago, but that is still, I think, a very good thing to take into consideration as you are thinking about how you are messaging, folks in terms of your end of year communications. Now a couple of things I do wanna say here real quick. First and foremost, at any point during today's session, if you have a question, please feel free to use the chat. I will answer as many questions as I can. Also, number two, this session, whereas the last few that I've done has been a little bit heavier on, like, the screen share, This is gonna be a little bit heavier on the slide side of things because I will go through the basics of how to create a communication template because I know there is a mix of, beginner, intermediate, and experts in this session. But I definitely wanna make sure I cover the basics there. And then it's gonna be a little bit heavier on tips, like things to consider as you are putting this stuff together, things to consider as you are preparing to put these things together. I wanted to make sure that I I kind of relay that because I think that this is something that has proven itself not just to eTapestry users but a lot of different people who get into, for a lack of better term, email marketing. Thirdly, as always, this is getting recorded. So, after today's session, you're always, welcome to revisit the session and, you know, check out the recording of it. And with that, also, in the docs section, I have a bunch of additional step by step information and other, resources there for you to talk about communications, creating them, generating documents, and sending out emails. Now as we look at our, agenda for today, largely even though this first step where I kinda go through those basics of creating a template, that is something that you will be able to use for both an appeal letter as well as an email template. A lot of my tips are going to be skewing a little bit more towards the electronic side, the email side of things. I will talk a little bit about, the the things that you might take into consideration when building an email versus a physical document letter, but I am going to skew a little bit more toward the email side of things. Then I'm going to talk about tips specifically for email content, and then I'm going to talk about how you send and schedule an email, and then I'll also, kind of share some more tips to consider when you're preparing really kind of any kind of mailing, to be honest with you. So I think the best place to start, as always, will be the basics and how do you create a template. So here is like any other thing, you start with one of the menus at the top of the screen. In this case, it's communications. I usually recommend whenever I'm sending, steps to somebody to say, go to communications and then manage communications. In the manage communication section, that's where you're going to be able to see all of your various categories, and be able to access whichever category you want, especially if you have a bunch of additional, categories than the original four that almost every database comes with, the thank you letters, receipts, general mailings, and email templates. So what it looks like once you click on the manage communications is you'll see your various categories here. You can always create a new category just like with queries and reports. Everything kinda has that same workflow. Right? You start with one of the menus, then if you go into manage, you'll see the various categories that are listed, and then you always have the opportunity to create a new category, or you can select one of the existing categories. Now the two different squares that I have around this information, the new category or the email templates, honestly, depending on the type of communication that you are really working with, that may be dependent on whether or not you are selecting, like, say, the general mailings category or the email templates or you're creating a brand new category. Like with anything else, this is all about your organization's personal, tidiness or your personal organization around what category you would what you would use or if you're current, create a new one here. Now once you get into the, into the categories here, or once you get inside the category, the task box changes. Now what you will typically see is the option to create a new drag and drop email template or a, classic email or document template. Now I would actually recommend that you go with the classic. The reason why, I will explain here in just a moment. But if we're really kind of looking at, like, an appeal letter, I actually would recommend a little bit fewer graphics and a little bit more getting to what your ask is. That's not to say that any time of the year if you're sending out a newsletter and you want people to visit your website or if you want people to sign up to become a volunteer or if you just want to have a general donation link in a newsletter, that is perfectly fine, But when it comes to targeted, like, appeals, like and when I say targeted, I mean, this very specific communication is meant to ask people to do something, make a donation or attend an event or sign up to become a volunteer for a specific event. That's where I'm talking about, like, you really probably want to steer clear of a couple of the different layout options, and I'll talk a little bit more about that here in just a moment. But if you click on the option to create a classic, email or document template, then you go in through these various settings. And on the first step, this is where you will name your template. Now keep in mind that the name of the template tends to be something a little bit more, internal. Right? It's gonna be what you refer to the letter as. So it may just be as simple. Yes. These are, these are from eTapestry. So, yes, this is inside eTapestry. If you go into communications, you click on a category, and you click to create a new email or document template. Yes. So when you, in this first step here, this setting step, the first thing, you know, you're asked to do is to name the template. And like I said, this is your internal name. So it may just be, you know, a winter twenty twenty five appeal letter. But do keep in mind that once you name the template, by default, whether you are creating a document or an email, it will drop that name down into the email subject line. However, you're always able to manage that subject line. So for example, you may call it the, you know, winter twenty twenty five, email appeal or something like that. But your subject line will probably say something more like, you know, happy holidays or, you know, make the holidays brighter for someone in need or whatever the the message is. Now, obviously, those are extremely generic in this you know, I'm trying to come up with this off the top of my head in the middle of a live session. So, but I have some tips around talking about, like, the email, subject line as well here in a little while. But this is where you can get into your email settings, right? These settings are where you can go in and you can say, okay, yes, I want this to have a forward to a friend option. I want it to be something that will have a view as a web page. View as a web page is always going to be something very easy for people to be able to share, on their social media. You can share it yourself on your own social media if you send the email to yourself. And below that you'll also have your document options. Now the key thing that I want to point out for the document options if you're creating a document and not an email template. The first thing is, you know, you want to make sure that you have the proper size for your document. Now these include all sorts of different sizes that are available to you, whether it is a, you know, the the North American layout sizes or the European, style layouts. You also have the ability to adjust the margins as necessary. Some people print on, on, letterhead, some people, will place a letterhead into their template. You can always adjust that those margins to fit properly. You could have a smaller, top margin, or if you're printing on something that's already preprinted letterhead, you can expand that margin. You can also adjust the margins at any point in time if you want to try to keep things to one page or two page or whatever the case may be by adjusting the top, bottom, and the sides, but these are all available to you on this very first step of creating a template. After you have this sorted out and you have these settings created, the next thing you're asked to do is to select a layout. Now this is where I'm going to talk a little bit more about, one of the the main tips that I have when it comes to appeal letters. I would say, again, to stick to more of a simple business letter layout. That is something that is found under the documents options in this step of creating a new letter or email template. Even if you are sending an email, I would still probably recommend utilizing the simple business letter. The reason for that is is that, like I said, if you're just sending out a general mailing, like, a newsletter every quarter, every month, every other week, whatever your newsletter, your newsletter cadence might be, of course, you're going to include, you know, various different articles that may have a link that takes them to a larger part of your website that might explain more about what that article and newsletter is about. You may have individual, quote, unquote, generic links for, like, your everyday donation form, or you might have a link to sign up for, for, an event or whatever. Those things might be things that are part of announcements. When it comes to, like I said, this more targeted that I really want my donors to do something, the business letter layout typically is going to be more successful. And the main reason why is and I'll talk in much more greater detail about this when I get into the tips here momentarily. This is going to get more into the idea of cluttering up the message. Right? You the business letter is going to be a lot more direct. It's going to have only maybe two or three templates or templates, paragraphs inside the template and it's not gonna have all of these other pictures, images, other links, other ideas into it. So I usually recommend the simple business letter when you are dealing with a purposeful call to action. I'm asking my donors to do a thing. The simple business letter really helps you kinda get to that point a little bit faster. More on that here in a little while. I I feel like most of this first section is just teasing later sections. I apologize for that, But I did want to at least get into the basics here of how to create the, the template here for those who need it. Once you get in to the edit step so you've selected your layout. It takes you into the edit step. Now when you select one of those preconfigured, options like the simple business letter, you will see that when you hover over the body of the of the template, it will kind of it it will kind of put a little border around it. When you click on it, it will pull up this edit contents window. This is where you'd be able to manage the message that you want to put into the email. You'll notice that a lot of the various functions like bold, italics, your font stylings, the font size, indentations, bullet points, all of that stuff looks very much like Word or any other word processing tool and that's kind of the point. So you'll you have all of those that are available to you. There are some other features above that, above the template message where you can, you know, you can look at how it would look without any HTML. You can also potentially add additional sections. Most of that functionality you probably wouldn't use. The key functionality is going to be when you click on a section and you see those options and those even include the ability to upload images, to make links out of, certain words or phrases, whatever the case may be. Now you'll notice that all of these layouts will already come kind of prepackaged with some sort of a letterhead at the top or other images in various other layouts. You have the ability to change that out or to remove that as necessary. To change it out, you basically just click on the section that has the letterhead, double click that, there'll be a way to get into what we call the, resource browser. All of that is available to you in the, help documents that I've attached to the session. But, the key thing is is to be able to manage these things from here. Now Catherine has a great question here. Can you add font options to eTapestry? The answer to that is unfortunately no. Now we do provide quite a few different fonts. The reason why we don't allow for additional ones to be added, at least in this format. The reason why is that we wanna make sure that the emails that you're creating from the what's the WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get template layout. And we wanna make sure that those are sent to look as as much like this screen here as you are setting as you're creating the the message as possible. Now what that means is is that we do have to sacrifice certain things, like certain, font formats, and font types, because it's possible that somebody might be using a form of email or viewing their email in a way that won't show that font, and, therefore, it would not look the same to them. Not that they wouldn't see anything at all or not that they wouldn't be able to get the email message, but it wouldn't look the same as the rest. So it's a little bit arbitrary, I admit, but we don't allow for any additional ones to be uploaded. Now that said, remember, going back here let me go back a slide here. You'll notice the very first template in each one of these categories is called a blank template. That allows for you to when you get onto this screen here and you look at those, various functionalities, there is a button that would be made available to you to go into the HTML. So if you do have somebody at your organization that designs, you know, like HTML for messages, the HTML will tell what type of font that is. So that might work a little bit to your advantage to have a, specific font because the HTML at that point is the one that's kind of controlling what that, what that email looks like. The only problem with the, blank template is is because that's an advanced form, we really wouldn't be able to support any, any strangeness in terms of formatting or anything like that that might come with that. That would have to be managed on your end, but that could be a possibility to take into consideration. But when you're working within one of these preselected formats, the, that HTML button isn't available because this is more of what we call the guided mode. Alright. Now one of the things I definitely do wanna call out though is one specific button that might come in handy in almost any communications that you do, and that is the merge tags option. You might wanna send out a an email. Obviously, the email template or the or the template layout itself, whether it's a document or an email, is already going to provide a lot of stuff like the person's the the donor's name, their address, all of that stuff. But one of the things you might be able to consider doing is say, well, what if I showed when they last gave or what their grand total is of, you know, they're giving to us or something like that? The merge tags work exactly the same way as the report columns do. They have the exact same categories. They have the exact same fields available to you. So you would be able to personalize this fairly easily by saying, okay. I want to not only have their name and their salutation and greet them the way I wanna greet them, but I also wanna be able to put in some very specific information about their giving habits or what their last gift was or when, or, you know, how many gifts they have given total. All of that would be available in one of these categories whether it's the commonly used fields by using received or by, using date with the option, under the options tag in the merge tags window to, you know, show the last received date. You could also use your summary fields as well just like with re with reports. So there are plenty of additional, options there that are available to you that would be, help make it that much more personalized. Whether you are sending a document or an email, that same those same merge tags are available to you. Now once you complete your template, under steps, now there are a couple of things that you could do here. You can use one of the save and options. So you have save and finish. That will return you to the category, and you will see your new template at the bottom of the list in that category. You can click save and create documents so that will send you to the steps to create a document. You can do save and email which sends you to the steps to create a mass email or you can do save and edit which basically saves the template, refreshes the screen and you stay basically on the edit step. Now the yellow arrow is pointing at these preview options and down here you can send yourself a preview email, You can create a PDF or Word document that allows for you to view the template, what it would look like if you printed it out. So depending on the type of communication that you are working with, you have the ability to really kind of see what you're doing before you actually say, yes. This is exactly how I want it formatted. Yes. This is exactly how I want it to look. Now I'm ready to either print off these documents or send them off. Now one of the things that I am going to say is, you know, like I said here in the upcoming section here, and I'll go ahead and go to that there. Again, this is going to be skewed a little bit more towards email content when it comes to the way that you are working within the system. Now the way that you would want to be able to, really kinda make sure that if you're going to send emails, I have some tips here that that will kinda go through that. But when it comes to your documents, the primary difference between an email and a document is most people, and I'll I'll talk about this a little bit more later too, will generally just kinda get an email, scan over, see if there's anything important that they need to do or see in that email, and they just kinda move on. Whereas document, especially when it comes to appeals, that's where you might tell stories about the people that you are helping or the people that their donations would go directly to to assist. It tends to be a little bit more fuller when you're creating a a document. You know, I mean, I'm sure we've all either sent one or received an appeal that is almost like a little pamphlet, right, where it says these are the people that you are assisting, these are the people that you are working with or that we are working with to help basically get you to, you know, to get the the things that they need to have a full life and so on. Now when it comes to email content, I would say these are very, very key things to kind of take into consideration and to be thinking about. You want to try to make an email as simple as possible. The first thing that I would always say and this is something that I would say would be your recommendations going forward as far as how you are communicating with people. You wanna make sure that the from line, the people that you are sending the email from, whether it is a general inbox, if it's your executive director, if it's the development director, you know, whoever it is that would be the person who will be basically make it seem like the email is coming from them. Keeping that as consistent as possible is a really good idea because it builds a rapport with your donors. That probably goes without saying, but I know if I recognize a name in my email, I tend to be more likely to click on it to read what's inside it. Now the, the limit the, you know, the amount of information in the body. And what I mean by that is if you're sending a mailing and they and somebody receives it in the mail, Yeah. You might have stories that will be told with a little bit of a, you know, how can you help. Here's the information that you want to, basically convey as far as how that donor can assist in whatever that, appeal is asking for. In an email, you do tend to want to keep that as concise and to the point as possible. Again, a lot of people, they're not really sitting there in front of their screens reading long emails. Instead, they are looking for the, you know, they're they're looking for the thing that you're asking them to do or, you know, looking for something that will be appealing to them to interact with. So limiting the amount of information in there is a really good idea because just the way that our brains work when we're reading something digitally, we kinda wanna we we expect that to be a little bit faster, a little bit more, to the point for a lack of a better term. However, you should let your own voice be heard. I think we've kinda come to the point now where when you're sending a letter, that tends to be more professional. That tends to have more of a professional voice behind it. And I think now when we get into the world of texting and sending messages, even between coworkers in an I'm or when you're sending emails, we tend to now speak more conversationally in our, in our written communication electronic in the electronic written communication, I should say. So this is an excellent opportunity to make it sound like it's coming from you or from somebody who isn't just part of a, of a generic info inbox or something like that. Use exclamation points if you want to be excited about something. Use things about, or, you know, use, maybe more shorthand type of way of speaking. Like, instead of saying, you know, instead of necessarily spelling out your entire organization's name every time, maybe use the abbreviation. You know, be a little bit more human. That's always a good idea because that allows for you to insert some hooks to be a little bit more, attention grabbing within the message itself. You really are only working with about no more than maybe five lines or five sentences in a paragraph to get before you get to click here to make a donation. Right? So use some hooks to to grab that attention, and the more human you sound, the more likely the the hooks will be, more natural to kind of throw in there. As far as building relationships, that's also gonna come from being a little bit more human sounding in that message, being a little bit more conversational sounding. Also, with email, it's always a good idea to leave the door open for responses. Let people communicate back to you. But at the same time, in your message, there should be some sort of a sense of urgency created in the message. You know, set goals. Be you know, say that this is what you're looking to do by December 31. That makes it sound like something that is a little bit more urgent for you to receive some funding. And we know in the world that we live in right now, there's going to be urgent needs. Right? I mean, that that's something that that we have to take in as a part of our life right now is that there are going to be, you know, very urgent needs for funding to come to help those that you are helping out. And it's always a good idea to set that kind of goal. Set that idea of saying, you know, by this date, we would like to have raised this much money. This is how you can help us do so. Click here to donate now. But also, don't miss don't mix the signals. Don't put into your into your email, I would like for you to donate, or I would like for you to volunteer, or I would like for you to to RSVP for an event. Keep it just one message per that email. And in this case, it's an appeal, so we would want you to say, please make a donation. Right? That's the goal here behind this particular message. You can always have at the very end a link to the website to do other things, but the message should be driven towards getting somebody to click on your website link in your email or, you know, even if you're just sending a, a communication via the mail, it's the same idea. Right? The idea is to receive that little piece of paper back that's got the donation on it. But when it comes to an email, it's even more important to be able to just stay to that single topic of we want you to make this donation. Now it's always a good idea also to have a plan for success. Right? You know, have a single call to action in the message body. That was what I was just basically talking about as far as keeping it simple. You know, keep the call the call to action, quote, unquote, above the fold if possible. Now above the fold is an old term if you are imagining the email to be a letter. Right? You have two folds in an in a letter before you put it into a envelope. Right? Well, the same idea here is is if you can imagine the the email printed out on a piece of paper, where is that first fold in the letter? Well, it's going to be in the first third of the body. Right? So you wanna make sure that you are keeping the ask as far up close to the top of the message, as close to the salutation as possible so that you are able to before people kind of get distracted by another email or distracted by other things that are going on. They already see the link that you want them to go to to make that donation. So the the earliest that you can get there, the better. But also, like I said, you know, keep all links in the message as dedicated as possible to the call to action. I just said a few minutes ago that might that it could still be okay to say, you know, here's a link to the website. That might be something that would be put into the footer or put into the out you know, into the closing salutation from whichever name at your organization is going to be appearing to send the message. But the idea is is if you're going to have two or three links, you know, telling people where to go to your website, they should all be pointed to that same donation page, to that same goal. I also recommend that you gather and resize your resize your images before you start that. Keep in mind that a message and email typically looks best if it is no wider than, say, 800 pixels, because it depends on how the person is viewing that. So it might be something to, to to take into consideration. So you wanna make sure that if you do have any images that they aren't overpowering the entire rest of the message. I also don't recommend that you use a single giant image in the body because depending on how people are reading the email and what program they're using, it may not come through with anything until they click to receive the the, images to download the images into the message. So it could be a little confusing if all you have is a single image and it doesn't really indicate what that message is. There is a way to resize photos inside of the tapestry. The only thing is with it so, like, when you upload the image, there is the options tab in the insert edit image. So there is a way to be able to say, okay. I want it to only be this wide. The only thing you can't do is you can't change the orientation of the image. So you wanna make sure that the images that you're uploading are already oriented the proper way so they don't turn up sideways or anything like that. But you should have some ability to resize that within the options or within the edit, image window. That's definitely something I can show next week in the, in the, ask the expert session. But, yeah, that is definitely something that you can do. It's sometimes a little bit easier to have that already sized down to the proper size to begin with. You know, you could always look on you know, there are various websites, various, tips and tricks in terms of what's the the best size for an email image, or a website image or whatever. There's all sorts of tips and tricks on that that's that you could find on Google for sure too. And then lastly, always make sure that you're testing. Whether you are sending the preview email or if you are sending a test email to maybe just a few people, like, to your own personal email address, so on and so forth, That's a good idea as well. Now speaking of sending a test email, let's actually talk about sending the mass email as a whole. So once you have saved your template, you'll see that the template is listed there, and you will also see that underneath that there are a series of links. Now one of those links is to create a document and that will take you through the steps of creating a document. The steps to create a document are relatively straightforward. That's not really why or that's really why I didn't I kind of opted to not show those steps in these slides, but I wanted to make sure that they are included in the various resources that I put into the docs section. But, here, if you have saved your template, you can click to, to create that mass email. If you have, finished creating your template and you just wanna go into save and and, mass email, you can do that. Excuse me. Or you can also go into the, into the message itself and and do another resave and, you know, save an email as I showed in the previous steps. But if it's already created, you go into communications, you click the category that you save the communication in, and then you click mass email, and you'll see these four steps. Now in step number one, you'll be asked to, basically, decide between a basic mass email or an advanced mass email. I typically will recommend the advanced mass email for a couple of reasons. Number one, our partner, Deliverum, does a lot of the legwork to basically jump through any hole, any hoops, to avoid that being marked as spam and all of that sort of stuff. In addition to that, there is also, a report that you would be able to run from reports, when you go into reports, and there's an option there to click on the eTAPs, your standard reports. There's also the email delivery report that is found there. So you can find out who opted out, who opened it, and so on and so forth. Basic mass email does not provide those. But when you get into the mass email recipients, you have two options. You can create you can send a mass email where you can then select the query that you want to use. You know? So that's something else to take into consideration is who are you going to send to? Who is it that you want to you know? There might be various different options as far as, like, I only wanna send the people that haven't yet given this year. I believe I included some step by step links to that as well in the docs. But you can also send it to all of your constituents. That's fine too. If anybody has opted out, don't worry about that, you know, from, like, a previous email because Delivera, as well as the basic mass email, if you did end up using that, would take those into consideration as well. Now the other option that you have here is to send a test. Now you can click on that and you can choose up to five specific email addresses that the test will go to. And that will effectively be the same email message that anybody else is going to receive in the mass email. If you included the, forward to a friend or if you included the link to view as a web page, all of that stuff should show up in your test email. So this is a little bit more full than the preview email that you can send while you're creating the template. So that is something to consider and this is what I say, you know, when I said make sure that you're always testing. This will really help you understand what this email is going to look like for the people who receive it. So it is a good idea to do the test before you actually send a mass email. Then on step number two, this is where things get really kinda cool. So one, you are able to specifically put the name and the email address of the person you want to appear to be sending the email. So, you know, this kinda goes back to saying, like, okay. Well, you don't have to use a general inbox. You could use somebody like your executive director, your development director, you, you know, whoever it is that you want to appear to come from. You can also send this on the behalf of somebody else too. So, like, let's say your executive director, in this case, my executive director, John Smith, at my organization is going to be the one who appears to be sending the message, but I'm the one who's doing these steps. I transcribed what he wanted to send. I created the email. I'm sending the email to the list of people that we wanna send it to. So you can do that, and I can say, okay. Instead of it coming from me, I can make it look like it's coming from John Smith. I can also send a confirmation email to say that the email job has completed to anyone else that I want or to multiple people. I you should be able to separate, email addresses in that by a comma, but you would be able to say, basically, okay. I'm gonna make this look like it's coming from John, but I wanna know when the job is complete. And normally when it comes to mass to advanced mass email, it will take a full twenty four hours for the for that confirmation to come through. The reason for that is is if there's, for whatever reason, somebody who has a full inbox or there's something that's preventing delivery to a particular inbox, this the deliverer will continue to try again every four hours for twenty four hours. So, you know, so you that person will receive that confirmation that the email job was completed, which then also means that you could go in and start looking at the email delivery report under the standard reports section in in eTapestry. But, so you are able to differentiate who that person will be that will receive the, the confirmation versus who looks like they are sending the email. But we also have the scheduling option here. If you check that little box, it will say, okay. What date and what time do you want this to send? One thing to keep in mind is if you schedule something that you then want to change exactly who is in the in the, query to receive that, you do have to unscheduled it and reschedule it. But, like, let's say you complete everything today and you wanted to send first thing tomorrow morning, you can do that with the scheduling. So you'd be able to say send it on 11/13/2025 at 8AM, and it will take that into consideration what your user's time zone is, and that's what that schedule will work off of. So you can, you know, schedule this to go out in advance and then basically say, okay. It's all scheduled. It's all ready to go out, and that and that will be waiting for them in their inboxes in the morning. And, basically, what that does is that it sends the information off to our partner at Deliveroo, and Deliveroo holds on to it until that that date and time, and then they start, distributing the email then. Then on the final step, this is where you can see a preview of how many emails are going to be sent, how many people may be, not not attempted. Those are people who have previously opted out or, if you have been sending emails, when people ultimately, either opt out or there's a permanent failure on their email address and they're not going to receive it, they will be considered not attempted later for future emails. But this will give you a little bit of stats. You will then be able to see there in the blue. It will say if it's scheduled. This is the date and time it's gonna go out. It's going to give you a preview email based on somebody in your, email list from your query. And if all of that looks good, then you click the send button that's the, that's under tasks, and it will send off the email. Now to quickly just kind of talk about, like, what steps are available inside of, you know, like, when you're creating a document, All of this stuff is basically the same idea. The criteria is the query that you're sending to, there might be some other options there as far as, like, how you wish to group them. In this case, you would just be sending one document per account. On step number two, your document options are going to be, whether or not it's going to be a PDF or a Word. The, the other options there would be, whether or not you want it to be sent to or if you want it to be sorted by their last name or by their ZIP code. It depends then that that's more for, like, how you plan on effectively stuffing the envelopes at that point. If you're in Canada and you need to send a receipt, this wouldn't be the case with an appeal letter. But if you're sending a receipt, that's on step number three. Then your delivery will be how you're going to receive those documents to print off on your, at the office. Are you gonna receive it via an email? Probably not because it's going to be a pretty large file. But, you know, are you going to send it to your Dropbox? Are you going to download it? Tracking is if you want to include a mass interaction into the people's accounts. And then the preview run is effectively the same thing as the preview send. It will tell you how many letters are going to be created based on the previous steps that you've filled in, and then running it will then start generating those documents. So a little bit more straightforward than email because email is is coming up with like, oh, who do you want it to appear to come from and all of that. But, but those steps and the information that what you would select there is included in the docs section as well. Alright. So just to kind of wrap things up here, here's a few more tips to consider when you are preparing a mailing, specifically if you are sticking to the digital communications. So here, if you're sending an email, it you know, just remember that it's typically scanned, not read word for word. So that goes back to the idea of making sure that you're keeping your message, what you're wanting people to do, as quick and as obvious in the email message as possible. But then, also, you know, it's always good to consider what's the what's the content going to be, and what's going to make it interesting? It does not hurt to potentially look at, like, something like chat GPT to help, you know, say, okay. This is what I want people to do. Create a message that might be, you know, that might be a good thing for you to you know, or might get somebody to make a donation or might be dynamic or might be interesting or might get right to the point. Obviously, knowing it's a, you know, knowing your audience is a huge thing because that helps you with the way that you want to communicate with them. That doesn't really matter if you're sending a letter or an email. Knowing your audience is huge because you know if you know your audience well enough and they know you, you'll be able to use some of those shorthand communication tips. Right? Like, saying something that means something to your organization that they would understand as well or vice versa. Right? So, you know, knowing your audience is great. If you get even more personal, obviously, in one to one kind of communications, that's where you get really into the weeds as far as knowing that person that you're talking to. But when you're creating a more of a mass appeal, you know, understanding what your audience is there for and why they have chosen you is a great thing too. Right? That that makes things a little bit easier when approaching them, but you also wanna make sure that you're very clear about what you're asking for. I'd like for you to go to this link to make a donation, or I want you to read the story in this in this letter that I sent you so that, you know, I mean, sounds a little sounds a little cynical, but the idea might be to pull a little bit at the heartstrings. Right? That's a that's a perfectly fine, way you know, no matter how it sounds, that's a perfectly fine way of approaching people too. Right? You know, pull at the heartstrings a little bit, but be clear that it's not you know, it's they can't do these things for these people without the support of the of the donors. You probably wouldn't be telling the story in an email, but, you know, you do still wanna be clear about what you're asking them to do. Always having a schedule is a good idea too because it gives you the idea of, like, okay. Well, if we know that we're going to send out our end of year appeal on December 1, that's a Monday this year, then what do I need to be prepared for leading up to that? Probably December 1 isn't the best date to to pick her as an example because the next day is giving Tuesday, but I digress. But having that schedule is a good idea to say, okay. I wanna make sure that I have gotten this message, that I want to send out approved, that I have the links that I need, that I have my images ready by this date so that I can then do the work of creating the template so that it is ready to be sent out the door on Monday, whatever day, at 8AM. Right? And then it may not be a bad idea to report back your successes. That keeps people engaged. That gives people an idea or a feeling that, hey. I help them achieve their goals. I help them get to what they needed to do and I feel good about helping people. Never underestimate how good it feels for people to be a part of helping others particularly in this sort of way, in a charitable way. So reporting back your successes is always a good idea too, and that could just come as a follow-up email in the January. If you've if you've set the goal of of raising x number of dollars by, you know, December 31, maybe a couple of weeks lay later send something out saying, you know, we did it. We made our goal, and it's thanks to all of you. That's always a good way to keep people engaged and wanting to continue to support you as well. Caitlin included, Yeah. I've read that anything in bold should be able to be skimmed and give the overall goal call to action for the entire document. Yeah. I mean, that's a that's that's a really good idea too. I mean, obviously, bold also is something that is eye eye catching. Italics would also be something that might be good to consider as well, because that that does help, like, hey. Bold and italics. I don't know about you, but I tend to read those more often than than just plain old text. But that is something to take into consideration too. That's a really good idea, Caitlin. Linda did ask us if there's a way to adjust the space the line spacing, especially between bullet points. That is something that I believe is something you can kinda play around with a little bit in the advanced mode of templates, but in the guided mode, it is usually kept pretty standard. That might be something I'll revisit next week in the ask the expert and and try to figure out what that, you know, what what options might be available to you there. Alright. So, let me start to kinda wind things down here for everybody. We are getting close to the top of the hour. As always, make sure that you use the resources that are available to you. We, of course, have our training section. We have, you know, support knowledge base, and the community. Community would be a great way to work with other people, especially if you're talking about making more dynamic email, templates or email messages. Might be a good idea to confer with the community to see what other people have done. I do know that, you know, a lot of what we have from, like, the knowledge base, I've included in the, doc section here about, you know, like creating a template, sending off a mass email, or generating documents depending on which way you're going. I think I even included some options or some, maybe one or two different, ways of doing a query to find people, like, who didn't give this year yet. So that's something to to take a look at as well. As always, we do have these various, programs that are available to you. We have the Blackbaud champions. This, not only helps us spread the word about Blackbaud products and services, but it does help you have a direct line to the, Blackbaud teams. You can participate in professional development opportunities. You also there's a reward system in there. If you are interested in joining the champions program, please feel free to let me know in the chat. Always looking for, additional people who might want to do that. One thing I've said, there are a few people I've reached out to specifically that to ask them if they would be interested. It's not a heavy lift. You do not have to be an expert in eTapestry to be part of the champions program, but, it does give you something that you could have a little bit more, activity around as well as, the Blackbaud team's ear as well. So something to consider. In addition, we have our reference program. This is where, you know, when somebody is a potential eTapestry client, we might connect them with a reference to talk about how they're using that. The references have complete and total control how often you are willing to take a call. If you are interested in that, please let me know in the chat as well. We also have, the spotlight your success, which will allow for you to, celebrate some of your successes. You can write a blog post or you could potentially join me on a webinar going forward. Always looking for ideas, in terms of how we can present some of this data some of this information to our database users. Oftentimes having an actual person who did do those things in an everyday practice for their organization is always helpful. So if you're interested in that, please feel free to let me know. One thing I am going to mention now but you will be getting an email about here in a couple of weeks, unfortunately, I've had to cancel our December sessions, due to circumstances beyond my control. You know, I was wanting to talk about some new, developments as far as, like, how we are upgrading the the compound queries. Unfortunately, that's not going to be released now for at least for right now. So I am going to cancel those December sessions, and I am also going to skip January. But in February, starting in February, there's kind of a three part thing that I have planned with another, one of my colleagues here that works in our services department. We're going to be talking about some things that, she has often talked about with large groups as well. That is going to be incredibly helpful for you to, potentially look at either growing or cleaning up your database in a couple of different ways. All of stuff that is part of your license already. So, I'm looking forward to that come February. But until then, next week, we still have our, ask the expert. I will be getting into a little bit more of the stuff that, that I talked about here, in terms of the actual functionality of creating a template or sending off a, mass email or sending off or create generating documents rather. So I look forward to seeing you here next week, and I look forward to, talking to you all again soon. And I hope you have a great rest of your week.