Problems integrating RE/LO Omatic Connector

Colleen Stevens

We are experiencing major issues in trying to implement the Omatic connector between RE and LO as it relates to creating email groups in LO. So much so that we are unable to integrate the product and move forward with the move to NXT.

• There is no current process for rebuilding multiple groups at the same time; we would need to export each query individually, which is a limiting factor.
• Building and refreshing groups needs to be an automated process. The current method is to request group rebuild or refresh directly from LO group page, which rebuilds the query from RE and updates group membership. In LO, we can also set the queries to automatically rebuild at specific intervals (ex. every day, every week).
  • Using ImportOmatic, we would need to re-export groups individually each time we wants to refresh group membership. The export process is time consuming (a group of 250 members took 3-4 minutes to export and we have many groups that are 1,000+ members). We need to be able to rebuild multiple groups the day of sending, so this process would easily add 1 hour or more to our email manager's daily email production workflow.
• Newly created RE group queries would need new RE export profiles AND new ImportOmatic export profiles in order to be added to LO, which adds another level of work to creating new groups. We typically create 2-5 new groups per month, typically in conjunction with any fundraising campaigns that we have running.
• The ImportOmatic plugin does not have any folder/grouping capability for organizing the profiles; the best that they have at the moment is a tagging feature.

We have gone back and forth with both Omatic and Blackbaud who say that all of their clients have the same issues as we have above and they are just working around them/have a larger team or less emails to send. Is that truly the case or are we missing something on our end?