Running Marketing Efforts - exclusions not working

Casey Myers

Has anyone experienced problems running exclusions in while running multiple Marketing Efforts at the same?


We are running many marketing efforts in parallel and the exclusions are not working. On our busy days, each team member can process 10 or more efforts each. That’s 40 efforts a day. Our highest priority efforts are often larger and more complicated, and can take 1-5 hours to run.


Blackbaud support gave us the solution to use the Enqueue setting in order to have the Efforts run sequentially, which the exclusions ran correctly. However, this prevents our team from processing the amount of efforts we need in a work day. 


How are others completing these processes? Let me know if you need more information?


Thanks,

Casey

 

Stacey Segal

Hi Casey, 

Are you saying that you're trying to use exclusions to
eliminate people from an effort based on other efforts you're
running at the same time?   So if there are 40 mailings
on a day you want someone who falls into mailing 4, 5 and 6 to be
excluded from those since they're also in mailing 1, but since
mailing 1 is so large, it takes time to run, and the exclusions
aren't working for mailing for other mailings? 

Or are other general exclusions not working? 

Stacey

Casey Myers

Hi Stacey,


That is mostly correct, we kick off multiple marketing efforts simultaneously, using the same exclusions file in order to eliminate people that are marked 'do not mail'.  In some scenarios the exclusions run, in other scenarios we have sent to Blackbaud, they do not run. In the scenario where they do not run, we came across a secondary issure 'WI Object reference not set to an instance of an object - When calculating segment counts' which has been reported to Blackbaud with no solution.  Has anyone had either of these issues?


We have lots of large efforts that can take hours to run, so due to time constraints Enqueue is not a solution. 


Hopefully that makes sense?


Thanks,

Casey

Paul Boblitt

Hi Casey,

 You are not alone in this. We discovered the same issue a couple of years ago with BBDM, when two or more marketing efforts call the same query/selection at the same time incomplete results are returned. Essentially one ME starts the query refresh, and before it is finished refreshing a second ME starts to refresh it again. The results are unpredictable, but most commonly we saw that records were not returned in the results that should have been. If you are interested in the workarounds we implemented that so far have worked (albeit painful at times), here is the breakdown.


Our users:

• I run a 4 person team that processes a high volume of marketing efforts, some of which can take 1-2 hours to run.
• Additionally we have other similar sized teams across campus that process marketing efforts at a similar volume as us.
• Lastly we have individual users across campus with access to build MEs.  

Our Process:

• For my team and the other high volume shops, we created duplicate queries for the universe and exclusions that are most commonly used. This way each shop including mine has it's own set of exclusion and universe queries.
• Within each shop, the users coordinate when they are about to calculate or activate a marketing effort (we use a dedicated Slack channel) 
• For the individual users we removed the access to calculate/activate, and instead they build what they need and then submit a ticket to my team to have it processed. (We have an SLA for this to turn around in 48 hours)
• Unfortunately, Enqueue is not quite there for us in terms of a solution but each iteration is getting closer. It sounds like creating the duplicate queries that overlap between users might solve your issues.

Cassidy Eaton

Hi Casey, 

I work with Paul Boblitt who also replied to your question.  I wanted to add that we submitted an Idea in the portal for some additional improvements to enqueue. It is number CRM-I-2886.  Take a look and add your vote or comments if you feel so inclined. 

Casey Myers

Thanks Paul and Cassidy! I will work with our Marketing Segmentation team to see if this workaround is doable. Also, I took a look at CRM-I-2886 and voted on your idea. It seems that enqueue is in not working in a way that benefits all organizations with large marketing efforts.