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MEC Weekly Digest | March 16, 2020

Welcome, Claire Hamilton: We are thrilled to welcome our new CU Denver eComm Specialist, Claire Hamilton. Claire's first day is today, March 16, and she'll be working remotely as the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve. Please join me in welcoming Claire to the team! Andy Ruemenapp will continue working remotely through April 3 to train Claire and assist as she transitions into her new role.
Farewell, Jeff Benn: Please join me in congratulating Jeff Benn on his new role at the CU Office of Digital Education as their Program Director of Salesforce Strategy and Implementation. Jeff's last day at the COE will be Friday, March 20. I think I can speak for all of us in saying that we are grateful to Jeff for all of the expertise he's provided to eComm over the years. Jeff, we wish you the best in your new role!

Issue: Some faculty, staff, and students have a subscriber status of held or inactive in Marketing Cloud due to ongoing bounces to their preferred email address (populated from Advance).
Impact: These faculty, staff, and students are not receiving emergency and transactional communications (or commercial communications, depending on their opt-out status).
Solution: Nonie Roberts and the COE team will be actively investigating this issue and assisting with identifying a better solution in their next sprint, which begins today. Thanks to Nonie and the COE team for their partnership on solving this issue.
Workaround: In the interim time, Jennifer Mortensen will manually export and reactivate all inactive and held subscribers who have an email address in at least one of the CU email fields. She will be carrying out this process DAILY until a permanent, technology-based solution is identified so that we can be sure our faculty, staff, and students receive emergency and transactional communications (or commercial communications, depending on their opt-out status) during this critical time. Since starting this process last Thursday, Jennifer has reactivated 7,799 subscribers.

Issue: Non degree-seeking students are difficult to identify and report on in Salesforce because their enrollment and education records are not populated.
Impact: Many MECs are reporting that they are hearing from non degree-seeking students who are not receiving emergency communications.
Solution: Based on what a few of you have shared in Chatter already, the best solution to address this issue is to request a list of non degree-seeking students from your campus records office and use Apsona to load those students to Salesforce.

Issue: The System-wide response to COVID-19 will not allow us to host in-person for new users, intermediate users, or those wishing to learn about Cvent Flex.
Solution: Melanie Jones has transitioned all in-person training to virtual training until further notice. Additional updates re: training that was scheduled to occur during the week of March 9 are as follows:
- We postponed the March 11 Cvent Flex training at CU Anschutz due to a rapidly-evolving response to COVID-19. Melanie Jones will work with Jason Thomas to reschedule the training.
- The Marketing Cloud portion of the March 12 New User Training was interrupted due to the platform downtime we all experienced. Melanie Jones has rescheduled the session for Thursday, March 19 from 10-11:30 AM.

Issue: Some students, faculty, and staff are being deactivated in Marketing Cloud due to ongoing bounces to their preferred email address (populated from Advance).
Impact: The inactivation causes some students, faculty, and staff to NOT receive emergency and transactional communications (or commercial communications, depending on their opt-out status). Even when we reactivate them, they will ultimately be deactivated again since the bad data is never removed from the source system.
Solution: Jennifer Mortensen will continue speaking with the COE about the need to develop an ongoing, bidirectional integration between Salesforce and Advance.
Workaround: In the interim time, Jennifer Mortensen will send weekly files of incorrect email addresses from Salesforce to the Advancement reporting team for removal from the source system. This project will occur in addition to the ongoing weekly true-up of data in the global email opt out field. The first file Jennifer sent to Advancement contained 12,518 incorrect email addresses.

Issue: We discovered last week that the new matriculation field for CU Boulder is causing an unexpected issue. While it does effectively remove pre-term students from communications, it ALSO removes pre-term students who are simultaneously enrolled in existing degree programs or who are simultaneously employed at CU.
Impact: Active students, faculty, and staff at CU who are also pre-term for any CU program will not receive communications, including emergency and transactional messages.
Solution: Jennifer Mortensen will work with the Boulder Strategic Relations team and the COE to identify a new solution that excludes only pre-term students who are not also currently enrolled or currently employed at CU.
Workaround: For the Office of the President (after consulting with CU Boulder to obtain their approval), we are not excluding any reports from any emergency communications. We will work during the next several weeks to determine a temporary solution for non-emergency transactional and commercial communications.

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