Kicking Off Your Welcome Series

I'm sure most of us have heard the term welcome series before. You know—those sequential messages that go out at automated intervals to introduce new constituents to our organizations and hopefully encourage them to get more involved. It's funny, though—for all we talk about having a welcome series, studies show that fewer than 15% of organizations have one.

When I talk to organizations about why they don't send a welcome series, the most common answer I hear is that they start the process—creating the segmentations, writing the messages—but are nervous about actually kicking off the messages. My advice is always to just start sending the messages. You can always refine your process once you discover what works or doesn't work for your organization.

However, before you start to actually send the first message, take a moment and think about when you want the subsequent messages in the series to go out. If you start all of the messages on the same day, you'll end up sending a mid-series message to unexpecting constituents. Instead, stagger the start dates to match the timing of each segmentation. For example, if the first message in your series should go to everyone who signed up with your organization yesterday, and the second message should go to everyone who signed up four days ago, set the recurring delivery for the first message to begin sending on a Tuesday and the second message to begin sending that Friday.

This will prevent constituents who did not get the first message from getting the second message.

For more help turning your welcome series from something you know you should do to something your organization actually does, Blackbaud University offers Luminate Online: Generating an Effective Welcome Series and Organizational Best Practices: Marketing—Welcome Series. And for help building the messages themselves, Blackbaud offers a Welcome Series kit.