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Emailing from the City can be confusing. It can be called any number of things (List serves, alerts, newsletter, receipts, etc). Email is the medium, and different kinds of emails can be sent from a number of different source systems.
In general, this repository and the digital team is concerned with 'marketing' emails. These are emails sent from the City to residents to inform or drive action. These can be editorial, such as newsletters, or automatically generated, like receipts or towing alerts. This repository focuses on Upaknee, but you can go here to see information about other city of Boston systems that generate emails.
Upaknee is the City of Boston's main email marketing platform. Upaknee replaced Lyris after a competitive bid process in the summer and fall of 2016. View a copy of the RFP. Upaknee is currently used for all newsletters.
To add or remove someone from a list, email support (at) upaknee.com. Upaknee is building more optimized list management functionality, but it isn't slated until calendar Q1-2 of 2018.
View a list of all newsletters.
There is a general City of Boston email content strategy outlined here. In general, it breaks down into two phases.
- Phase 1 - Have a modern tool in place that let's departments send beautiful and mobile-optimized emails, track basic stats, and allows users to sign up and manage their preferences. This is largely done.
- Phase 2 - Move departments to create more engaging content that more closely aligns with resident needs. Increase the use of list growth best practices. Increase the capacity of the Digital Team the run complicated marketing journeys, send emails with integrated algorithmic content, and run ongoing optimization tests in conjunction with departments.
As with all strategies, this is subject to change based on new conditions and information.
Upaknee handles most of the development. They have a standard feature/bug pipeline. We can pay them more to prioritize things, which can be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Things built using the Upaknee API, like boston.gov email signup forms, are built by our team and live in the boston.gov repo.
- Library template: The Boston Public Library wants to move onto Upaknee. They have a large list (and this is scoped in our budget). Currently, Upaknee is building them a custom template in their brand for which they are paying separately. We're advising on best practices, and will help with their import when the time comes.
- Metrolist imports: Once a week, the Department of Neighborhood Development sends us a list of new subscribers to the Metrolist newsletter. Those subscribers sign up via a Salesforce widget and need to be exported into Upaknee (into the Metrolist preference) so they can be mailed to. We had been directly importing those subscribers, but that triggered a spam trap. We've been running those lists through a reengagement as we try to figure out a better solution.
We have a few projects, both content and product (mostly a combination) that have been identified as potential feature or content improvements.
Accessibility Updates
This actually breaks down to a number of issues and workflow changes. A Harvard Business School student and Digital Team fellow helped conduct research into accessibility best practices and did user testing with a user using a screen reader. The report on that testing can be found here. That report needs to be expanded upon and broken up into a set of best practice recommendations as well a set of changes to the Upaknee template (making alt text required for images, for example.)
Welcome series
Advanced email marketing shoots for a one-to-one experience. We should be moving towards triggered emails that hit the right people at the right time. A good way to experiment with this is with a welcome series. This is a series of emails that someone receives after signing up for our main email list. We have these set up in Upaknee, but we shouldn't launch them until there a plan to test, measure, and improve. You can read more about the theory and see the approved copy here.
Revamping transactional emails
We have a number of different systems that send email notifications. A Harvard Business School student and Digital Team fellow did initial research about this in Winter 2017. Figuring out how we can unify the look and feel of emails, and potentially send them all out of the same system, would be a good future fellow project. Eventually, the goal would be a single place where customers can manage all of their emails, alerts, and notifications from the City.
Upaknee widget for Salesforce
Several parts of the city use Salesforce as a database (Metrolist being the largest example). If we co-develop a Salesforce Appexchange Upaknee widget, it will mean departments can use Salesforce as they system of record, but send through Upaknee. It will also mean we no longer have to do manual reconciliation. The Department of Neighborhood Development has put in for budget to do this. We could build direct connects more quickly and easily, but syncing two databases is a nightmare.