The recurring send last week surfaced a range of issues, so this Task will be a starter list of takeaways and action items for the retro.
**FORMATTING**
1. Similar to last year {T242799} donors were confused by the inconsistency of the amount listings. For USD, whole dollar amounts had no decimals, but non-whole amounts had one or two. A US donor might see 3 USD 3.1 USD and 5.35 USD on the same list. This applied to other currencies like GBP as well. If possible, moving to a standard two digits after the decimal for appropriate countries would be great. {T220636} has some context about the code involved. Reviewing the currency and amount formats for other countries would be helpful as well.
In Hebrew the donation summary words are in an odd order: “ILS 2020-01-04 10: 1 תרומה” - the currency and the amount they are not beside each other.
2. When the job began to run it quoted the past year's donations as 2019, so this is a process note to update that when running it next time.
3. From a small sample it looks like credit card donors did not receive the cancel instructions:
| ZD 912673 CID 30073763 | Ingenico | no instructions
| ZD 912643 CID 47877903 | Adyen | no instructions
| ZD 912674 CID 29542649| PayPal | got instructions
| ZD 912635 CID 23971654| PayPal | got instructions
The placement is above KM's signature, so this is not something that email clients are clipping in the donor replies.
4. ZD 909793 CID 41439768 is an Adyen donor who received chargebacks, and their receipt listed the negative amount adjustments to reconcile the chargeback amounts. ZD 910875 CID 3998004 is another.
We should exclude these if possible. And just as a process point, can we confirm that we are excluding refunded donations?
5. I have seen feedback that some languages lacked unsubscribe instructions, but we'll have to check some sample tickets to see whether they are more examples of #3 above.
6. {T242801} Excluding from the job any canceled recurrings with only 1 donation will be really helpful for next year.
7. Two pieces of feedback about the French-language footer: a) it has a cropped version of the tax details, and just says: “//Numéro d’exemption fiscale aux États-Unis : 20-0049703”// b) has word ‘easy’ in it: //Si vous souhaiter annuler votre don mensuel, suivez easy ces instructions //. The ask here is to review the translation.
8. Salutations in non-EN languages proved tricky. We opted to omit salutations for Japanese donors in {T271185}, and we should review the formatting for Hebrew speakers as the format is different than for regular TY emails. Phab is not letting me paste an exact sample of the HE salutation, but ZD 910971 is one and searching for SL: Re: זו קבלה, אבל גם הרבה יותר מכך
will find more examples.
**CONTENT**
1. The subject line: //This is a receipt, but it's also so much more// yielded confusion from some donors. "How is it so much more than a receipt?" and "Is an attachment missing?" were two examples.
The current SL may be slightly heavy on the engagement push, and for Donor Services ticket response we hope to use more of a neutral, transaction-summary-like tone for this email content. Conveying gratitude is important, but with the Thank You email campaign following so soon we would like to err on the side of not encouraging engagement for its own sake with the EoY recurring receipt send.
We learned last year that referring to the donation amount in the SL was a complicating factor, so I think keeping that out will be a best practice..
2. An additional challenge for content is that this email will be received by both active donors and those who canceled their donation at some point in the previous year. Some of the latter will mistakenly think their donation remains active, like ZD 912657. It is tough to allow for this in the upbeat grateful text (and I don't think we need anything like '//whether your donation is still active or not, we really appreciate...'//), and this is the kind of feedback that we may not be able to eliminate. But maybe reversing the date order of the list so that the most recent donation is at the top, and more visible at a glance, would help reduce this confusion.
**PROCESS & TEAMWORK**
1. More coordination between Fr-Tech and Donor Services about the precise launch date and time, and the size and duration of the runtime for the send, will help Donor Services with managing Zendesk volume and scheduling agents.
2. We did review the issues from last year in Q2 2020 preparation, but additional testing and alignment of expectations across all stakeholders will help next time. This is a really complicated job!
3. One common issue Donor Services has seen last year and this year is confusion from donors about why their Endowment donations are not listed in the summary. Legal is reviewing whether Endowment donations really really must legally be separate from Annual Fund donations - if it is possible to combine them next year, that would be a big efficiency gain.