Any company or organization with an online presence knows the importance of highly targeted bulk email. Bulk email allows you to give important information to people related to your organization, whether they are volunteers, staff, customers, or potential voters. Email is one of the most personal forms of communication on the Internet, and the bulk email marketing features of the Patriot donation management system allow you to maximize its potential.

Patriot's Bulk Mail Module

Full integration with other sections of Patriot

The bulk email module of Patriot is tightly integrated to the information in your account. For example, you can send bulk email messages to people who have donated, volunteered, or are members. Even better, you can filter based on any number of fields, allowing you to send information only to volunteers in a certain city or only to donors who have given large amounts of money. Read more about the filtering capabilities of Patriot below.

It's easy to include links to your Patriot forms in a bulk email. You just need to select the donation, volunteer, event registration, membership registration or bulk mail subscription form that you want people to visit. We highly recommend doing this, since it can result in far more donations and volunteers for your organization without any additional investment of time or money by your staff.

Easy subscription functionality

Once you have your account set up, you'll want people to be able to join your contact lists. We automatically create a subscription page that you can link to. It's also possible for us to build a sign-up form directly into your Website to make it even easier and attractive. That covers new subscribers, but what about existing contacts that you may have? Read on for our list import capabilities.

Import and export capabilities

Do you have an existing mailing list in your email program? What about a database of registered voters provided by your local government? You can easily make use of these by importing the information into Patriot. If you need a copy of all of the bulk mail contacts for another purpose, you can easily export full or filtered lists to Microsoft Excel format.

Advanced filtering capabilities

There are virtually unlimited ways you can filter your bulk mail contact lists in Patriot. You can filter donors by the amount they've donated, volunteers by the types of activities they've offered to help with, event attendees by the number of events they've attended, members by the amount of time they've been a member, and much more.

Contacts can be tagged with keywords that you specify. For example, say you have a record of the languages each contact speaks. You can tag each contact with the appropriate language and send bulk email in the language they prefer. Do you know how a contact is registered to vote? Tag them accurately and send them bulk email focusing on the topics they'll find important. It's a completely flexible system that is both easy to use and extremely powerful.

One of the best part of filters is that they're reusable. If you send a bulk email to everyone in Madison, Wisconsin that owns a dog and has donated at least $100 to your non-profit, it's even easier to do the next time.

Sending messages (and making them look good) is easy

Have you ever received an email that was hard to read due to background colors, weird font sizes, or even flashing text? It's pretty easy for people to send bulk mail... it's far more difficult to send bulk mail that people will read. Patriot makes it easy to do both.

We have a powerful, yet easy-to-use template system that allows you to select a predefined layout that is well organized and attractive. If you wish, you can also create your own templates to get a more unique look for your bulk mail. Each template you create or select can be used over and over, meaning your outgoing messages will have a consistent look that people will associate with your company, organization, or campaign. You can even incorporate your logo or pictures, which results in more professional email with a personal touch. Some people can't receive graphics in their email, which is why we also send messages in plain text format. This means everyone will get the information you want them to receive.

When you're ready to send your bulk email, you just select the appropriate contact list (or filtered list), template, and fill in a few extra fields like email subject and send date. You can even easily send a test message to yourself to verify everything looks right before sending to your entire list. Outgoing messages are saved so you can easily reuse them in the future.

Adherence to federal rules and proper online etiquette

The Federal CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 requires certain information to be included with bulk email in an effort to reduce unsolicited bulk email (SPAM). Since we hate spam as much as anyone, we follow these regulations as closely as possible by including proper contact information and unsubscribe links automatically with every email. This keeps your organization out of trouble and keeps your contacts happy.

When you send a bulk email, a certain number of messages will be undeliverable. Perhaps someone changed their email address or put a spam filter in place that is accidentally blocking your messages. Obviously there's no reason to keep trying to send to these addresses, since that would only result in more work for our server and higher costs for you. We like keeping both of those low, so we automatically mark undeliverable email addresses as such and don't try sending to them again. Patriot will show you how many people were marked as undeliverable along with the number of subscribers and the number of people who have unsubscribed. It's easy to keep an accurate tally of your contacts with Patriot bulk email services.

That sums up the bulk email marketing section of Patriot. We hope you can see how powerful this system really is, but if you need additional convincing we'd be happy to give you a demo of the system or answer any questions you might have.