Wordfly/Tessitura Company Practices

Hi everyone - Our set up...

• Which departments can create templates, send and deploy them? Who has a login?

Effectively, all departments who will regularly need to produce campaigns have WordFly logins for one person and handle their own Template and Campaign set up and circulation. Multiple users within the Comms group have deployment permissions. We rely heavily on Starter Emails (and, now, a little bit on Custom Blocks) and these are built by Comms staff to be quickly adjusted by anyone (delete blocks that won't apply for a particular message). When content demands something more unique for layout, it's typically a Comms campaign or one of us will create a wireframe version and then turn it over to the department end user.

• How did / do you test new functionality (for your org)? e.g Pages | Surveys | triggered campaigns | Conditional content...

To date, the Digital Services department/I experiment with new functionality and develop a strategy, then start involving other end users once their programs have a need for it. 

• What is your process - does every department use it. How do you manage this use to ensure quality control and that no rogue emails go out / the templates that other teams use are not affected.

  Would also be interested to see how this might have changed with COVID and if this has opened up it's use across your teams.

I've found that the "regular usage" concept is so important. As someone else said, people in other departments specialize in other things--learning a new software platform, plus perhaps Tess extractions, and all the best practices of email and responsive design can feel really outside of that. All campaign work used to be handled by Marketing/Digital Services (me) but the communications calendar has grown exponentially over the last 10 years. There's generally a tipping point as to when we needed someone within a department to take responsibility for their projects, due to volume. But this has only worked when someone was able to habitually use WordFly. Otherwise, the possibility of a learning curve just fizzled.

Nothing has changed philosophically because of the pandemic, though we did have to re-activate having an end user in Education because of the volume change.

• In terms of usage - who edits you templates? When Sponsorship / Philanthrophy proof do they proof and send back to Marketing to incorporate changes or on smaller campaigns do experienced Wordfly users edit content direcly in the template to save time or is that  too risky?

Calendar, brand identity/design, and voice are overseen by Comms/Digital Services. When we have an event schedule as the backbone of everything, I have everyone from the various departments confirm their expected campaign list for the year and then get it all entered into a consolidated calendar with adjustments negotiated to keep potential overlapping things spaced out (summer project). Things come up or change timing; we fold them in and move things, but the basics are in place to plan with. Who campaigns circulate to depends on the project, but there's always someone from Comms doing the final proofreading (including brand and style guide checks) and deployment.

• Do 2 emails ever go out in the same day if there is no major overlap in the lists who receive them e.g Schools content V Enews?

Sure. We work hard to space out anything to the "full list", but there are some things that should never have overlap (Educator update and donation ask). If a particular day is of upmost importance to two different projects, we can also always manage segmentation and suppressions very carefully so that no one gets two. I feel like the only time this ever happens for us is when there's a regular campaign and then a really targeted invite. The latter usually feels so unique to the user that it doesn't even read as a second message. When this happens and someone might very appropriately get two messages, I do try to put a couple of hours between the sends though, just so they are less likely to be read at the same time.

Hi everyone - Our set up...

• Which departments can create templates, send and deploy them? Who has a login?

Effectively, all departments who will regularly need to produce campaigns have WordFly logins for one person and handle their own Template and Campaign set up and circulation. Multiple users within the Comms group have deployment permissions. We rely heavily on Starter Emails (and, now, a little bit on Custom Blocks) and these are built by Comms staff to be quickly adjusted by anyone (delete blocks that won't apply for a particular message). When content demands something more unique for layout, it's typically a Comms campaign or one of us will create a wireframe version and then turn it over to the department end user.

• How did / do you test new functionality (for your org)? e.g Pages | Surveys | triggered campaigns | Conditional content...

To date, the Digital Services department/I experiment with new functionality and develop a strategy, then start involving other end users once their programs have a need for it. 

• What is your process - does every department use it. How do you manage this use to ensure quality control and that no rogue emails go out / the templates that other teams use are not affected.

  Would also be interested to see how this might have changed with COVID and if this has opened up it's use across your teams.

I've found that the "regular usage" concept is so important. As someone else said, people in other departments specialize in other things--learning a new software platform, plus perhaps Tess extractions, and all the best practices of email and responsive design can feel really outside of that. All campaign work used to be handled by Marketing/Digital Services (me) but the communications calendar has grown exponentially over the last 10 years. There's generally a tipping point as to when we needed someone within a department to take responsibility for their projects, due to volume. But this has only worked when someone was able to habitually use WordFly. Otherwise, the possibility of a learning curve just fizzled.

Nothing has changed philosophically because of the pandemic, though we did have to re-activate having an end user in Education because of the volume change.

• In terms of usage - who edits you templates? When Sponsorship / Philanthrophy proof do they proof and send back to Marketing to incorporate changes or on smaller campaigns do experienced Wordfly users edit content direcly in the template to save time or is that  too risky?

Calendar, brand identity/design, and voice are overseen by Comms/Digital Services. When we have an event schedule as the backbone of everything, I have everyone from the various departments confirm their expected campaign list for the year and then get it all entered into a consolidated calendar with adjustments negotiated to keep potential overlapping things spaced out (summer project). Things come up or change timing; we fold them in and move things, but the basics are in place to plan with. Who campaigns circulate to depends on the project, but there's always someone from Comms doing the final proofreading (including brand and style guide checks) and deployment.

• Do 2 emails ever go out in the same day if there is no major overlap in the lists who receive them e.g Schools content V Enews?

Sure. We work hard to space out anything to the "full list", but there are some things that should never have overlap (Educator update and donation ask). If a particular day is of upmost importance to two different projects, we can also always manage segmentation and suppressions very carefully so that no one gets two. I feel like the only time this ever happens for us is when there's a regular campaign and then a really targeted invite. The latter usually feels so unique to the user that it doesn't even read as a second message. When this happens and someone might very appropriately get two messages, I do try to put a couple of hours between the sends though, just so they are less likely to be read at the same time.