Bulk Mail & Email Communications
The Political Courage Test Administrator will work with the Elections Research Director (as necessary) to carry out scheduled mail and email communications throughout the administration period for each candidate group. These communications will be included in the PCT Master Calendar. Political Courage Test administration for each group spans 6 weeks (no fewer than 4 weeks), and mail/email contacts include, in this order:
1. Initial Mailing
2. Confirmation Email
3. President's Message Email
4. Nag Email Mailing
5. Hail Mary email
Bulk Email Merge and Send Out
The Political Courage Test Administrator will reference the Elections Department Master Calendar to determine when to send out each form of bulk email communication. The Confirmation, Nag, and Hail Mary emails all use a similar process, although the text and subject lines vary from message to message. Refer to the previously approved text for each bulk email. The process works as follows:- In Admin, Select "NPAT Mail Merge" (located under "Data" on the left side of page)
- Use the "NPAT Group" drop-down menu to select group
- Select all states you're mailing the PCT to
- Check the "unpassed candidates" box
- Mark which office you are mailing (easy to forget this step)
- Choose an election stage
- Select "Show Bulk Email Candidate List"
- As soon as the list is generated, scroll through the generated list to make sure the state and office levels are correct
- Before typing the email, fill in your own email address in the "To:" field (this will ensure an email is not accidentally sent to candidates)
- Copy and paste the email content (subject line and body) from the file on the NPAT drive into the admin email textbox
- Make sure the due date is correct for that group (must change from group to group)
- Make sure the "update password" check-box is NOT checked (updating passwords will render all passwords sent out via mail unusable)
- Send test email to yourself (read it in your email and test the links)
- Send test email to Elections Research Director & National Director for approval
- After getting approval, remove emails from the "To:", leaving the box blank, check your mailing list one more time, and send to candidates
- Email lists longer than 100 emails sometimes send messages straight to candidates' spam folders, or fail to send. To avoid this issue, you can split the contacts into smaller groupings, by state and/or office. It can also help to space out these groupings, with 10 or 15 minutes between emails. After sending to the first group, you will need to start the process over and generate the list again. Make sure to follow all the steps again while doing this. Note that it is easy to make a mistake and miss checking a box while quickly generating subsequent lists!
