Email Mailing List

Mary Eagan
Mary Eagan
Fourth Anniversary Participant
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions
I am totally new to RE and work at a small institution. I have an email mailing list of about 9k people, but only a small number of those people on the mailing list have constituent records in NXT. (We cannot afford to create constituent records for our entire mailing list.) My question is: Can I create emails in NXT and send them to people who do not have constituent records or is the mailing list for NXT-created emails dependent on constituent records?

Comments

  • Heather MacKenzie
    Heather MacKenzie
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 August 2025 Monthly Challenge Badge bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge
    Is your 9K mailing list outside of Raiser's Edge totally, such as in Excel?


    I'd create one record, and add the email addresses to it.  I think that might work.
  • Faith Murray
    Faith Murray Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper
    Three solutions: you can add all the emails to one record, making sure they all share the same email type, so that they are all pulled when NXT sends an email. I haven't experimented with this recently (as we moved to Mailchimp for our emails), but three years ago, it worked. The small downside is that you won't really be able to accurately track performance data for this segment.


    Alternatively, if you have money to spare, I know that Omatic offers a custom solution just for this situation; a companion software that holds your extra emails and non-constituent records. I considered this idea for awhile (and I promise I'm not affiliated with Omatic in any way). 


    What we did was a third option, moving our email communications out of NXT/OLX and into Mailchimp. The deal was sealed for us when people were unsubscribing from our emails altogether because they couldn't customize their subscription preferences to receive just certain types of emails. Also, Mailchimp offers way more in the way of customizable merge fields in emails, so we can reference their last gift amount, memberships, etc. I understand some of this may be on BlackBaud's development radar, but in the meantime, it just wasn't working for us. The downside of this is that you, of course, must then manually import contact and transaction data between the two platforms to keep your RE info current.


    Hope this is helpful.

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