Mass Edit Follow-Up Requests/New Status

[Joe Francisco]

I created a form for people to register for a recent event.  It prompted a Follow-Up Request with they registrant marked "No" if they didn't have a church home.  We had 27 new people indicate that they had no church home.  

I want to Mass Edit that I sent a follow-up email to each of them.  Is there a way to do that?  I can't find any option of that allows it, I hope I'm just missing it.

Also, for every new person that came and registered I added them to a new Mailing List.  Is it a good practice to create a New Status for them, or would it be better to add them to a Mailing List and not create a lot of different statuses?

[Robert Jones]

We looked at tracking emails once and I only saw two ways to do it, neither is perfect. (If someone has a better way please let me know!)

Method 1 was through Notes. Create a new Note Type of Email Sent or Eblast (or whatever name makes sense to you) and then put a unique email_title_here into the body. For future custom searches, you use Field: Notes - Public, Operator: Contains, Values: email_title_here.  It works and gets the job done. Potential issue is you have to make sure that whatever note you use is the exact same for each person and remember it for the Values search term later. Any typos in a persons note will cause it to fail to find that person.  Now with Mass Edit, it removes a lot of that worry as it'll insert the exact same thing into everyone's account. 

Method 2 was through Events. Create a special event for that email and set it so noone can checkin and it's not published anywhere. When you send an email, mark everyone that received the email as "attended" that event. Issues are it has to be done manually, Mass Edit won't let you check people into events. It also can clutter the calendar in Elexio with these type of events, this really depends on how many events you have in elexio. On the plus side, it's an easy way to go back and see when you sent various emails. 

Before Mass Edit they were both about even, but since you can update a Persons Notes and not Events with Mass Edit, I think Method 1 is slightly better now. At the time, we decided to do neither and continue to use a third party system for most of our emails.

Regarding Status Codes, we do not create a lot of them. We keep them pretty regulated to the persons current status in the church (newcomer, member, member - moved away, etc). We use notes to track what brought a person to the church. Note Type we used is named "Source", in that we put things like hallelujah night, easter production, christmas giveaway, etc. Creating a bunch of status codes could work as well, and you can reference the first status code added to the account as their source/origination code in order to see what is bringing new people to the church. Again there are positives and negatives to both methods, it depends on what you feel comfortable using.