Bulk-email marketing packages for Higher Ed?

[Jonathan Woolson]

Does anyone have a recommendation for a general-purpose email marketing package that can be used by any department on your campus?

At SUNY Fredonia, we currently use Admissions Lab for recruiting outreach. Our School of Music and the Rockefeller Arts Center both use Constant Contact, HOWEVER, they each use separate CC accounts, so there is no simple means of sharing their (overlapping) constituencies/audiences. PR, Alumni and University Advancement/Fundraising use separate systems. We have not yet found a single solution that do the following:

BUSINESS GOALS/WISHLIST:
We would like to manage all outgoing bulk email sent from SUNY Fredonia using one single email provider so that we can:

1) Provide ALL email recipients (anyone who receives bulk email from our institution) with a single interface of all topics to make it very simple to subscribe/unsubscribe from any given topic area of their choosing (music, arts, alumni, parents, etc.)

2) Allow all campus departments to share/manage a single contact pool of all known contacts from a single, large database, BUT tag/flag or segment their own audiences for easy reporting, etc.

Any thoughts and discussion are appreciated.

Also, if this topic has been addressed before on UWEBD, can someone point me to a link to the topic/discussion?

[Scott B. Barnett]

Do you intend to integrate your house DB with the system, so you can import users from various constituency lists such as alumni or students or parents too?  These then further broken down into micro targeted groups, such as "all sophomore parents" or "all alumni of the basket weaving program?"  If so, you need one of the vendors that can integrate well with your peoplesoft, datatel or banner type systems.

 

We use Harris (an Alumni / Advancement focused company) for our integrated emails and also use Benchmark for general sends.  We have integrated all Athletics Marketing into the Harris system, along with Parent, Alumni and Advancement emails.  What is missing is the Admissions part, but there is resistance to merging the two processes (for some good reasons we could discuss at length offline).

 

Scott B

[Jonathan Woolson]

Thanks for the reply, Scott, and the recommendation for Harris. We use Harris for our alumni directory and alumni address verification, but now I'll look at their bulk email services, too! Thank you.

I'm fairly certain that we'd look at the possibilities for imports and backend integration with Banner, etc.

Yes, I can see Admissions keeping their standalone system... but we are VERY interested in moving everything else into a single system to (dramatically) improve our customer experience and reduce silos/islands of contact info for music, arts, giving, alumni, etc.

Thanks again for the advice!