We’re thrilled to announce the release of several updates designed to improve your experience with Social Sync.
These new additions are designed to streamline your workflows, improve data accuracy, and empower you to make more informed decisions.
Whilst there has been many improvements since the last official product update announcement, this post covers some of the main ones.
Let’s dive into the details…
Email Analytics (Beta launch):
Following the launch of our drag and drop email builder at the beginning of the year, we’re now proud to launch the first iteration of our email analytics.
The stats can be accessed via the new journey tab in your campaign dashboards or via the link in the top right corner of the email builder.
Aside from letting you monitor the delivery and performance stats for each of your emails, our handy preview function also lets you see the exact email that was sent to each individual supporter, complete with their unique placeholder tags and button links populated.
Overall stats to date show that, in less than 2 months, we’ve successfully delivered over 36,000 emails.
Performance also compares favourably with our historic data (from Mailchimp), with average open rates across all campaigns of 58.8% and clickthrough rates of 8.0%.
This also stacks up very well against averages across the nonprofit sector of 28.6% opens and 3.3% clickthroughs (source).
This is just a beta launch and further data and aggregated performance charts, will be available in the coming months.
Campaign Record Enhancements
Our innovative campaign record lies at the heart of Social Sync’s supporter management and is one of the most utilised features of the app.
We felt it was in need of a refresh and have added some new functionality and a fresh coat of paint.
Email unsubscribes
Consent management is very important to get right (I’m looking at you GDPR).
Social Sync essentially operates on a dual model of consent.
On the one hand we allow you to collect marketing consent via the checkboxes on any of your forms.
Campaign stewardship, on the other hand, operates under the principal of legitimate interest.
When a supporter signs up for the challenge it is normal for them to expect a certain degree of communication about both the challenge at large (e.g. around start dates, end dates, overall campaign performance, what their contribution can help achieve, etc…) and also other, more personalised, communications (e.g. first donation, order processed, amount raised, etc…). Legitimate interest allows you to process their data (i.e. send emails) on this basis, irrespective of their marketing consent status.
Of course, a supporter can unsubscribe themselves at any time via the footer link in every email we send on your behalf. In this case their status will be updated to “unsubscribed” in your campaign audience, and they will be removed from your challenge journey.
However this is separate from withdrawing marketing consent per se, and customers should be careful to specify when dealing with any manual unsubscribe request whether this should apply only to challenge based comms or marketing consent in the broader sense.
Fortunately, unsubscribing a supporter from a campaign’s stewardship journey is very straightforward. Simply navigate to their campaign record and click the 3 dots menu to reveal the unsubscribe link.
If the link is greyed out, then it means the supporter has already been unsubscribed
Please note: If you would like to resubscribe a supporter that has previously been unsubscribed, then please reach out to our supporter team via the in-app help widget.
More powerful campaign audience management to provide granular control over each communication channel is currently in development and will be available soon.
Move registrations
As we endeavour to make Social Sync more user friendly as a self service platform, we are also delivering additional functionality which historically has been managed internally by our team.
Foremost among those is the ability to manually move a registration from one campaign or to another.
This is particularly useful for organic fundraisers (i.e. Facebook birthdays and generic fundraisers) which may have been manually created by a supporter but nonetheless need to be allocated to a specific campaign.
This common task is now mercifully easy to accomplish, in just a few clicks from the supporters campaign record (see screenshot above, its in the same menu as the unsubscribe option).
You’ll see a modal like this one:
Simply choose the campaign on the right that you’d like to move this record to, and Social Sync will take care of the rest. 🙌
Refreshed supporter panel
Finally the campaign record modal has had some styling updates and general enhancements. The supporter side panel in particular, now looks stunning 😍
Enhanced Data tables - improved search and filters
Another update aimed at enhancing the live of our users, our data tables have received a major overhaul.
The filtering functionality has now moved to the right side of all tables to align with the search; plus many new filters are now available across all our data tables.
The quick search feature has also received some love, and many of the most popular search terms like:
- email,
- name,
- phone number,
- postcode,
- fundraiser urls,
- and more…,
are now fully searchable across all areas of the dashboard.
Pagination and sorting has also been improved.
The campaign record also now includes data tables which are filterable and searchable just like the ones on the main dashboard. 😎
Tag management
Tags are essential part of any CRM and we have made several improvements in this area.
A new tags management table is available (via the settings menu), where you can easily add, edit and archive tags.
The simple act of archiving a tag will remove it from your dashboard to prevent cluttering the UI with old and unused tags, however it won’t delete the tag from the supporters it was already applied to (just in case you need to reactivate it in the future).
Tags are also now searchable on all data tables.
New sidebar layout
Last but not least we’ve updated the main navigation sidebar to include some new pages.
The fundraising tab has now been renamed to “Campaigns”.
And new pages have been added to provide quick access to all registrations and all fundraisers.
These pages will be improved in due course, but our aim here was simply to expose the maximum about of data – great for searching and filtering, and full of insights! 🧐
…
We hope you like these updates. They represent just some of what our team have been working on and there are plenty more exciting features to come.
As always, we value your feedback. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team if you have any questions or suggestions.
Author’s Note: Whilst the screenshots in this article are real, all personally identifying information (PII) has been blurred/changed, and profile images have been substituted with AI-generated replacements.
