Ever made a mistake? Forget to tag your mailing? Missed a tag? Messed up your targeting? Get a little sweaty before pressing that send button? You’re not alone.

Checklists help pilots and surgeons remember every detail in stressful situations and they can help you too.

ActionKit’s draft_dash dashboard report is perfect for this —  it appears just before the Send button on the Proof and Send screen, and you can customize it to include a wide range of automated checks.

What do I check for?

Chances are, you already have a process for sending a mailing that looks a little something like:

1. Draft, review, and incorporate edits
2. Determine best targeting
3. Get some proofs
4. Proofread the email carefully
5. Click all links to ensure none are dead
6. Take action on your page to make sure it looks good
7. Make sure everything looks correct on mobile
8. Take a deep breath and click send

Eight steps is already a lot to remember — and there are so many other things we could check! We remembered to use HTTPS on our links, right? We didn’t forget any mailing and page tags? (I could go on!)

Some of these are things that we need to review manually; others we can check automatically through ActionKit.

If you can write a report for it, you can include it

You already use reports to see how many people took action on your page or opened your mailing. But you can create reports to see other things too, like which tags are associated with a page.

If you set up your tags by tag type, you can also make sure that each page or mailing has at least one tag of every required type. You can also check to make sure that the tags are consistent between your mailing and page.

Many clients use custom page fields to control whether a page shows a 501c3 logo or a 501c4 logo, and you can check for this custom page field too.

Is there a targeting query that you must include (or exclude) with every mailing? You can make sure it’s there!

Reports vs. Dashboards

Reports are built with the Query Builder (or written in SQL) and pull information directly from the ActionKit database.

Dashboards are HTML pages that can pull information from lots of reports at once. draft_dash is a special dashboard — if you create it, ActionKit will put it just above your Send button on the Proof and Send screen of each of your mailings.

Take a look at the code for the Rolling 12 Month Email Performance Rates Dashboard — you’ll see you can use Django template tags, lots of reports, CSS, and Javascript in your dashboards to make them powerful and flexible.

Start small

Even if you only added a bulleted list of your mailing process to the draft_dash dashboard, it would still go a long way toward reducing mistakes since that’s the last thing campaigners see before clicking the send button.

<ol style="list-style: decimal;">
	<li>Draft, review, and incorporate edits</li>
	<li>Determine best targeting</li>
	<li>Get some proofs</li>
	<li>Proofread the email carefully</li>
	<li>Click all links to ensure none are dead</li>
	<li>Take action on your page to make sure it looks good</li>
	<li>Make sure everything looks right on mobile</li>
	<li>Take a deep breath and click send</li>
</ol>

Next, let’s create a report that will make sure a campaigner has written something in the mailing’s notes field. The notes field is a great way to know what a mailing is about without having to open it and read the whole thing, so we don’t want to leave it blank.

Let’s create a new Custom SQL report to check to see if the notes field was left blank.

SELECT
    IF(core_mailing.notes is null or core_mailing.notes = '',
	   'The notes field was left blank on this mailing!', '') as preflight_notes_check     
FROM core_mailing
WHERE
    core_mailing.id = {{ mailing_id }}

Notice how in line six we use {{ mailing_id }}. When using this with the draft_dash dashboard, ActionKit will automatically fill this in with the mailing you’re viewing.

Now we can use this SQL report we just created in our dashboard. Here I’ve added it under the checklist we already had:

<h4 style="background-color: magenta; color: black; padding-left: 50px;">
	{{ reports.preflight_check_mailing_notes }}
</h4>

Remember: if there’s something in the notes field, then nothing will show up here. If the notes field is blank, then the message “The notes field was left blank on this mailing!” will appear against a bright magenta background.

These reports are included as a suggestion to help you get started. You can build on this little by little, adding in checks as you go. For best results, make sure that staff is trained on how to use the dashboard and knows how to refresh the report once they’ve made changes. And once staff get used to the dashboard, they’ll find the extra checks and reminders useful, catching mailing mistakes you might have missed before!

 

(Updated April 2021 to show examples of using named prefixes rather than symbols, and emphasizing using multiple tags)

ActionKit has many built-in ways to see the performance of your mailings. The Rolling 12-month Email Performance Rates report is one of my favorites for showing how your overall performance is trending.

But do you ever wonder how well specific types of mailings perform? By default, your Rolling 12-month Email Performance Rates report shows the combined performance of every mailing you’ve sent. But petitions perform differently than call alerts and fundraising appeals. While it’s good to get a big-picture view, sometimes we need to take a different approach.

ActionKit’s built-in reports will answer questions like “What’s the average click rate of our mailings?” But maybe we have other questions, like:

• What’s the average click rate of our petition mailings?
• What’s the average click rate of our fundraising mailings?

What are tags, anyway?

Tagging your pages and mailings makes answering these questions easy. Tags can be used to describe pages and mailings in a way that can be used in analyzing your data, like to differentiate a petition mailing from a fundraising mailing.

Clients who work on a variety of issues might create a tag for different issues, to differentiate between how well an immigration mailing performed compared to a mailing about the Supreme Court. Or to see that mailings sent to a random sample of your list won’t perform as well as a mailing sent to your most active members.

You could create a tag for each of these different situations and apply them to your pages and mailings, then analyze your performance on a per-tag basis.

Grouping tags together

The tags themselves also have context and meaning, so it makes sense to group them.

Pages and mailings have lots of different categories that you could associate with them, like:

• Purpose (petition, call, letter to the editor)
• Issue (immigration, Supreme Court vacancy, climate)
• Audience (random sample, most active)

UltraViolet (inspired by SumOfUs) created prefixes for each type of tag to group similar tags together. For instance, the purpose of a mailing or page became *petition and *call; the issue became #immigration and #climate; the audience was @random and @active.

Grouping these tags together with a prefix meant that they were sorted with similar tags, and best of all, campaigners didn’t have to remember all of the different tags, just the different prefixes, and autocomplete would do the rest.

Suggested tags

You’ll want to customize the tags and tag types that work for you, but here are some suggestions:

Type of Tag	Description	Examples
*Purpose	How are you asking members to take action?	*petition, *call, *lte, *share, *fundraiser
#Issue	What is the issue area(s) or reason you’re sending this?	#immigration, #climate, #healthcare, #abortion
&Moment	Is this related to a specific, high-energy moment?	&obamacare, &kavanaugh, &familiesbelongtogether
@Audience	What is the targeting / who are you sending this to?	@actives, @random, @everyone
!Target	Who are you trying to move?	!corporate, !media, !congress
$c3/c4	Is this a 501c3 or 501c4 action?	$c3, $c4
%Mailing phase	Is this a test, a full-list send, or a kicker mailing?	%kicker, %test, %fullsend
-Staff member	Who worked on this mailing or page?	-Shannon, -Tanya

Suggested alternative

These symbols are good, but even better might be using named prefixes, like topic- or target- or type-.

For example, revising the above to use named prefixes instead of symbols, you could do:

Type of Tag	Description	Examples
type-	How are you asking members to take action?	type-petition, type-call, type-lte, type-share, type-fundraiser
issue- / topic- (choose one)	What is the issue area(s) or reason you’re sending this?	topic-immigration, topic-climate, topic-healthcare, topic-abortion
moment-	Is this related to a specific, high-energy moment?	moment-obamacare, moment-kavanaugh, moment-familiesbelongtogether
audience-	What is the targeting / who are you sending this to?	audience-actives, audience-random, audience-everyone
target-	Who are you trying to move?	target-corporate, target-media, target-congress
entity-	Is this a 501c3 or 501c4 action?	entity-c3, entity-c4, entity-pac
phase-	Is this a test, a full-list send, or a kicker mailing?	phase-kicker, phase-test, phase-fullsend
staff-	Who worked on this mailing or page?	staff-Shannon, staff-Tanya

Never too late

It might seem daunting to try a new system if you’ve never set up tags before, or if you’ve been tagging your pages and mailings a different way for years, but here are some tips that can help ease the transition:

• Start by renaming your tags to conform to your new system
• Train all staff who use ActionKit on the new system and incorporate feedback into the plan.
• Triage the most important pages or mailings to go back and tag under the new system, starting with the pages with the most actions and mailings with the most recipients.
• Everyone work together through the backlog, preferably at the same time so you figure out the nuances between your different tags and achieve some level of shared agreement about what each tag means. This is a really important step, so don’t skip it!  

Consistency is key

The whole point of doing all this is to be able to analyze data in creative ways. But reliable, accurate data requires consistent tagging. UltraViolet customized the draft_dash dashboard report to check mailings and pages to make sure they have at least one of the required tags, and reminds staff if they forget. Best of all, the draft_dash dashboard report appears just above the Send button on mailings, so it’s the last thing campaigners see before sending.

Keep it general

Don’t get too specific with your tags! Think about them like movie genres, and remember that a page can have multiple tags, and each tag should be used by many different pages. (If your tags are single-use, it might be better to capture that information in the page or mailing’s description).

Think about your tags like one fact describing the page or mailing. To continue the movie genre analogy, a good tag for movies would be “Comedy” or “Horror”. Movies like Parasite (2019) would have both tags, and it wouldn’t be as useful to create a third tag called “Comedy/Horror”, in part because there would be very few movies with that third tag, and because having the third tag doesn’t tell you any more information that the first two tags didn’t.

Sample questions

Here are some questions you could answer using the suggested tags above:

• Do mailings with corporate targets have a higher click rate than mailings with congressional targets?
• How does the performance of a kicker compare with a regular full-send mailing?
• Are there specific issues that are more motivating to our member base? (Try to think of issues as broadly as you can. Even groups focused on a single issue will have issue sub-categories.)
• What is the average performance of our mailings and pages by type?

Depending on how you set up your tags, you’ll be able to answer these and many others!