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HOWTO: Best Practices for Sending
Email to Organizations
Confidential for use by American Cancer Society and Convio – Copyright © 2007
By: Chuck Talk, Support Engineer
© 2007 Convio, Inc.
Purpose: Insure Email Deliverability
PROBLEM: I have to send email through to members of
an organization (school, university, corporation,
association, agency, etc.)
 I’m worried that no one is/will receiving/receive my
communications
 My event depends on the ability to communicate
successfully with these constituents!
 Convio is here to help with Best Practices for Email
Deliverability to Organizations
© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Purpose: Insure Email Deliverability
SOLUTION: Exercise some Best Practices to alleviate
communication issues:

Decide on a standardized, single email address that
must already exist as the sender of all email to your
constituents (Very important)

A single email address makes whitelisting much
easier for the organization to implement

© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Whitelisting defined: the practice of setting an
email address as a safe sender address to allow all
communications through
Communication is the key to success
Best Practice: Communicate with the organization whose
email services you intend to utilize by sending emails
through their servers.

I would advise managing down – find someone with the
proper authority who can help you achieve what you
need to send your email through the organization’s
email servers.

Explain what it is you are doing and how this is a good
thing for the benefit of the organization as well as the
American Cancer Society.
© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Communication is the key to success

Although you may not think your emails are affecting
the organization, it actually does. Anytime your email
campaigns go through their servers, it may actually
slow critical organizational messages or interfere with
other deliverables that they have to meet as well.

Remember, they are your ally and you should work
together to achieve the best for all – diplomacy counts
for a lot of good will which can only help you reach your
goals. If you do not get cooperation, you will have
problems.
© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Communication is the key to failure too…
PROBLEM: I am blacklisted by the organization!

Blacklisted defined: The practice of denying, blocking
or otherwise working to prevent email from entering a
system based upon rules of either content, address,
subject lines or other criteria.

This usually happens because of a lack of
communication as the organization was not aware of
the sudden influx of emails and is trying to limit the
email services to internal users only.
© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Communication is the key to failure too…

Organizations may have rules in place that when a high
volume of email comes from a single address, they
automatically consider such email to be unsolicited
commercial emails (aka SPAM), unless they are aware
of the address beforehand.

They may have no knowledge of the Relay For Life
event, the cause or the people involved.

They may know the event though, and may consider it
a nuisance, as no one has involved them (they may
feel slighted).
© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Communication is the key to failure too…

They may also feel that their action is justified due to no
one talking to them to ask for permission to use their
system resources (very often the case).

As hard as it is to believe, the volume of emails may
actually be putting a strain on their network as well, in
which case smaller groups of deliverables might be a
solution to discuss with them.

Whatever the root cause – communication remains the
key to resolution that works for all. Involve them – you
are using their systems to talk to their users after all.
© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Knowledge is power as well…

You can tell the organization that you will be delivering
email from the Convio servers and that Convio is an
authorized sender on the behalf of American Cancer
Society via the Sender Policy Framework or SPF

If they check the SPF record (a text record attached to
the DNS record for Cancer.org) for the American
Cancer Society, they will see that Convio is an
authorized sender on the behalf of the American
Cancer Society.
© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Knowledge is power as well…

As you will be using a single email address as the
sender for your events through Convio, they can add
that email address to their whitelist if they choose, and
can verify the SPF for Cancer.org - giving them two
checks for SPAM filtering to allow your email through.

There is no guarantee that they must allow you
through, but with communication and discussion, you
are taking steps to ensure that they only see legitimate
email for the event pass through their systems, which
can buy you good will.
© 2006 Convio, Inc.
Summary
In summary, we have learned that the cornerstone of
success and/or failure is communication with the
organization whose resources you wish to utilize to send
your email.
We’ve also learned to use a single email address for all
official event communication, and to ask about whitelisting
or SPF checks for the event emails. We have learned to
involve the organization in the event in some meaningful
way so that cooperation is the long-term goal that makes
email deliverability easier for everyone.
© 2006 Convio, Inc.