Create a list. Do something amazing with it. That's List Master!

Our new newsletter (volume 2 here) is intended to help you discover all of List Master's powerful features, all the ways it can help you and your organization.

Mass Emails 

Not using List Master to send mass emails? We'd like to convince you that you should.

Like most organizations, you probably want to send emails, such as e-newsletters or appeal letters, to large numbers of recipients. List Master's integrated email-merging system provides many advantages over using your regular email program to send emails in batches. It's much quicker and easier, for one thing. It also lets you personalize the messages, track the open and click-through rates, and deal more easily with bounces.

Or maybe you use a stand-alone email system like Constant Contact or Verticle Response. These programs do track open rates and click-throughs but have some important limitations. They are not connected to your main database, so you cannot segment searches and target emails nearly as easily. You do not have a permanent record of who got each email, whether it was opened, etc. right there in your main database. With List Master, you can see all email activity for a given record, and you can even search for people who open your emails.

Stand-alone email systems often use templates, resulting in design limitations. Using List Master for e-blasts means you have more flexibility with the look of your emails.

Here's how it works: After creating the HTML document to be emailed (Sea Monkey is our current favorite program for this, but there are others, and we can get you started), you blast it out to an unlimited list of recipients in minutes. You can fully test the email first, sending it to yourself and other staff, so you know exactly how it will appear in client in-boxes. When ready to send the real thing, run a List Master search to generate your list of recipients; often this is a simple search for all clients with email addresses, excluding those who've requested no email. Click send, and watch the magic.

Click here for a detailed Help page on sending e-blasts. If you aren't using this feature yet, we would love to get you started. Email us at info@listmaster.org.

*List Master Tip of the Month*
DONOR SNAPSHOT Report

List Master has numerous built-in reports that are a cinch to run and full of powerful, manipulatable data. (You can find them on the post-search Results Screen under the Output Options drop-down menu at the top of the screen. For a description of each, click here.)

We just enhanced one of our most useful and popular reports, so it's a good time to tout its features. Formerly called Snapshot Listing, we've renamed it Donor Snapshot.

Donor Snapshot imports a whole bunch of donor information from your database to an easy-to-analyze Excel spreadsheet. It's intended to provide a full picture of donors at a glance. Columns show contact information, donation information, membership information and relationship management information for every record included in your search.

At client request, we just added a column to the report titled "Gifts Total (this search)." Here we total the gifts given by each of the donors in your search for any given period. Say you want to know which donors have given at least $500 in the past two years. Include those parameters in your search - using the "Totals From/To" and "Dates From/To" fields in the Transactions section of the Search Screen - and the totals will appear in your Donor Snapshot spreadsheet.

Donor Snapshot also shows total gifts given during the last 12 months and overall gifts.

In addition, we added some new columns drawn from the Relationship Management screen regarding most recent contact made with each donor: when, type of contact, with who, results and more.

As with all List Master reports, simply delete columns in each spreadsheet you generate that are not relevant to your analysis.

If you have questions about using List Master reports - or anything else - please don't hesitate to call or email.