[mmurrain]

I have a client who is using Raiser's Edge and is going to implement a
constant contact e-newsletter. It seems this would be a common thing. I
have some questions:

1) Does anyone have resources to make this easy? The current strategy
looks to be doing periodic exports, then import to CC. Sounds not fun. Are there other strategies - easier ones? Buying
any more services from Blackbaud is out of the question. They are
thinking only a one-way street: RE->CC - not worrying about the other
direction (because, strangely enough, the development folks don't care.)

2) Is there someone who knows both and has done this kind of thing
before that they can hire to get this accomplished in the next week?

[Peter Gulka]

With any external system like this your only option is developing an
import/export process. Depending on the fields Constant Contact lets you
import, I'd recommend taking over the Cosntituent ID and/or Constituent
Import ID from RE. That way any information you want to dump out of CC can
easily find a home in RE. For tracking in RE you'll be using a mix of
Actions and Attributes. Actions for the records to show the emails were sent
and Attributes to track any characteristics about the recipients like what
email group are they on in CC and things like that.

First place to start is what they want to do with the CC information. What
do they want to track in RE? Just that the emails were sent? Bounce
statistics? Open rates? Get that nailed down first and then look for places
in RE to track them.

[DavidZ]

I was at an organization a few years ago and we used both Raiser's Edge and Constant Contact. I seem to remember it being quite straight forward to integrate the two. This is even more so if they only want to go from RE to CC (I would really question that as they do not get any information about failed email addresses or unsubscribes - unless they plan to do that manually)

It seems that all you really would want to do is to write an export in RE and then import that data into CC which is straight forward enough.

This strategy depends on whether or not they they are using RE to store sign ups or whether they are using CC? If they are using RE then you need export all the newsletter recipients each time. If they are using CC then they need to export all the RE recipients since the last time the newsletter was sent out. If they are not planning on feeding back data into RE then using CC as the master newsletter recipient list is the only viable option.

David

[nak]

We have been doing this for about six months, and I have to say that it is pretty painless. I include the Cons ID as one of the Custom Fields in CC, so I can just dump out all the contacts and update any changes or import new people who signed up with us through CC. We have a pretty small list of e-mails, so it is pretty easy to manage, but we send out monthly newsletters based on cumulative giving levels for the year, so the ability to easily add CC contacts to one mailing or another based on an export from RE is really great.

[Nina Williams]

We use CC also. Each month I export to Excel and list of the email addresses from query and it integrates easily with CC. We get a few reports back, Invalid Email address, request removal etc, and I go back to the query and find the email and change the account. My part in RE takes about 10-15 minutes a month.