Why Don't You Make Like a Banana?
Split testing ("Oh, I get it, make like a banana!"), or A/B testing, is a great way to test email subject lines, custom senders, calls to action -- anything, really, that can affect the response to your outreach. And now, you can easily set up a split test when sending an email in Virtuous. A small, random sample of your group of email recipients will be sent version A of your email, and another random sample group will be sent version B. Then, after a predetermined length of time (you can choose anywhere from 2-72 hours), whichever version performs best, either in open rate or click rate, will be sent to the remainder of your recipient list.
Just begin creating an email like you normally would, and look for the "Send A/B Split Test" toggle on the settings screen.
Then, you'll be able to set up a new split test.
Use the slider to control the size of your test audience, and choose what metric Virtuous should use to determine the "Winning Version."
Then, enter a name, subject line, and sender (if you want to) for each version of your email. Once you begin working in the editor, you'll see buttons allowing you to toggle between both versions.
Just edit your content as you normally would, making whatever change(s) you'd like to test between versions, and when you are ready to send your email, you'll see a total count for the recipients, broken down by version.
Intrigued? Want to learn even more?? Well then, head on over to this support article!
Two Great Services That...Taste Great Together?
We are speaking, of course, of Virtuous and DonorSearch.
DonorSearch users have had access to integrated wealth data searches for a while now, but in this release, we are bringing you more. More data, to be exact, right at your fingertips. Now, when using the integration to find new wealth data on any Contact, you'll see a new button to "View All Wealth Data."
Go ahead and click that to view...well, ALL the wealth data. We've added almost 40 new fields, including some advanced scores, predicting a Contact's likelihood to give a major, annual fund, or planned gift.
You'll see additional insights into your donors' wealth and business income:
And even a breakdown of their charitable giving by organization type:
All of these insights are also available in the query tool, so you can use wealth data to power automated workflows and target donors and prospects for specific appeals.
You can learn more about getting started with DonorSearch integration right here in this support article.
This is Just a Test
Seeing as how we've had email on the brain (did we mention split tests? we did?) we also thought there should be a better way to test an email before sending it (if you are sending a split test, then this would be your pre-test test. 😉)
So, gone are the days when test emails do not contain actual merge fields or custom sender information!
Now, when you choose to send a test email from the email editor, you'll be asked to search for an Individual by email address. This means that you, or whichever team member to whom you'd like to send your test, will need to be an Individual in Virtuous.
By selecting an Individual, you'll be able to populate all the merge fields in your email and even see your test sent from whichever custom sender you specify.
Give it a whirl when working on your next email!
Developers' Corner
Last week, we sent out information on API changes for this release to everyone signed up for our Developer Digest emails.
This release includes some updated endpoints and two new endpoints for interacting with Custom Collections via the API.
If you are a developer, or if you just like to stay in the know on all the high-tech goings-on around here, just reply to this email and let us know, or use the support messenger to contact us.
...And the Rest
As with every release, this month's update also includes a number of other fixes, tweaks, minor modifications, and assorted nudges. Among this month's assorted fixes:
- By popular demand, we've added a "Type" column when viewing the list of Virtuous forms to indicate whether a form is a lead form, event form, or volunteer form (giving forms already have their own tab, they are special that way). You can even click to sort by type!
- While we're talking about forms, we've also added the ability to collect birthdates via a form. You'll see separate fields for Birth Month, Birth Day, and Birth Year. Drag them into any form to use them, just like any other system field. (Or don't! We're not the boss of you.)
- With the addition of birthdates to Virtuous Forms, we've also added support for importing birthdates when importing gifts in the Gift & Contact Import tool. Which means that even without a form, you can import birthdates from a csv file or even manually enter the data, all as part of gift entry.
- We haven't forgotten about Custom Collections, even though they do seem to be so last month. Now, you can choose to require a particular field within a Collection. So, if you created a Collection for "Tutoring," with fields for "Student Name," "Grade Level," and "Subject," you could choose to require "Student Name" to ensure that doesn't get left out of any new entries. Because then it might feel sad.
- With the power to require certain Custom Collection fields comes great responsibility: you can also choose to disable any field within a Custom Collection if it is no longer needed. (We know, the "responsibility" thing is a stretch, but we really wanted a Spider-Man reference in here somewhere.)
- It was brought to our attention that Mailchimp sync users were seeing unsubscribed Contacts synced to Virtuous as active list members, which is definitely a no-no. We've made sure that won't happen going forward.
- 🚨New field alert! 🚨 We've added "Marital Status" as a new field on Contacts. You'll have the option to choose one of four system values ("Single," "Married," "Widowed," or "Divorced") and admins can even add additional values to the list from the Data Customization tab of the Settings menu.
- We've made a tweak to the Data Health Center, so that when deleting a duplicate email address or phone number, any other instance of that email or phone will be re-evaluated: if there are no more duplicates, it will be removed from the Data Health list. (this sounds confusing, there's not really a good way to put it, but trust us, this is a good feature)
- New query parameters! When querying on date fields, you'll now have the ability to specify relative date values in the future. It's like the most mundane form of time travel!
- Tags on a Contact record have always been sorted by Tag ID, which basically boils down to the order in which the Tags were created. To make things a little easier on the eyes, we will now sort Tags alphabetically.
- Some restricted users were not seeing private gifts included in their yearly giving dashboard widget, which made for some perplexing metrics. We've made sure that private gifts are included now, so that data will be consistent across all reports and widgets (sometimes a little conformity can be a good thing).
- We heard from some users that deleted Contact Methods were still visible in the header on Contact records. This might have seemed a little spooky, and it was definitely not intentional (as far as we know). So, now, when you delete a Contact Method, it will disappear from a record entirely.
And that's the list! As always, if you have any questions about these or other features, feel free to contact our team using the support widget in Virtuous, or drop us a line at support@virtuoussoftware.com.