About mchristo

I'm interested in the details of the incompatibility between pre-March 2013 campaigns and those after.  What technical information can you share about that?  A detailed explanation could go a long way to making it understandable and possibly acceptable to many clients.   Unfortunately (or perhaps rather fortunately) I'm not a good prospect for participating in user studies right now: someone else in my organization does all the campaign design--I haven't created one of my own in three or four years--I'm just the guy who works with the Contacts data.  But maybe the next time you overhaul that area of the system, I could certainly provide feedback.  How are users notified of the opportunities to participate?   Michael ... View more

It does tab elsewhere at first, but if you tab three times out of the password field and then hit enter or spacebar, you'll be activating that orange Log In bar.   Michael ... View more

Bounce count is subtracted from Send count before Opens is divided by Sends.  So you had either 3 or 4 bounces.  Correct?   Michael ... View more

Terri, the tactic of saving past campaigns as drafts won't also save the results associated with each email.  You can probably see that yourself, but I don't know why Constant Contact doesn't point that out, because some customers will make their copies and then only when it's too late notice that they've lost all the counts on Sents, Opens, Clicks.  No one wants hundreds of drafts cluttering up the system, so I just went back through all the emails one by one to save the performance numbers of each, so I can continue to do some sort of historical analysis that goes back further than 2013 and/or 50 emails.  Of course now that that data will be in two different places, it'll be a little less convenient to work with.  But I don't think convenience has been very important around here for a few years.   It's unfortunate, but here in the forums most questions about the whys and wherefores are treated as rhetorical.  I've been asking for months about who (if anyone) provides the functional input and testing on their new designs during planning, programming, and before rollout, and I haven't heard a thing.  That's the area that needs the most improvement, along with better (read "any") transparency and user feedback concerning changes being planned or already in development.  A beta team of miscreants and cavemen could have prevented the Load More Campaigns design, for example.  And, still being on the older generation editor, I haven't even seen it for myself yet!  Just been reading the forums so that I can anticipate what's coming.   There is a question you brought up that I hadn't considered: are there going to be rolling deletions now?  Or is this pre-2013 purge all we have to be concerned about?  I've done what I had to do to save performance data on everything that's going to be deleted from our account.  But I'd certainly like to know about future deletions now, before our account is "upgraded."   Michael ... View more

But after we've run a search on the Contact Management screen, when we're looking at a list of 30 people with the last name "Miller," for instance, that's when we could use what Barbara is talking about.   Or will you never see this comment now that the idea is Closed?   Michael ... View more

What are we voting on? Was this change put into production or not?   Michael ... View more

I think he's refering to the State field of the Contact information on the Contacts screen where users do data entry.  Ours isn't a drop-down either.   Michael   ... View more

It's as painful as if they pulled them out with pliers, isn't it? ... View more

Do NOT instruct your customers to use the Forward button in their email client, unless you want to have to sort out mysterious Unsubscribes later.  If Customer A uses their email client's Forward function to send your email to Stranger B, then Stanger B opens the email and clicks the Unsubscribe link, it unsubscribes Customer A.   If you are okay with the instances where that will happen, go ahead and encourage forwards.  Some users don't care, because the instances are few and far between.  Other users who don't know about this issue spend time failing to figure out how Custumer A was unsubscribed, and spend more time failing over and over to simply add Customer A back to their contacts.   Michael ... View more

CostumeC, I locate it on page 6 of this thread.  Thanks.   by CostumeC on ‎04-25-2016 01:01 PM Options   I stumbled upon a way to view old emails in a simple list with pagination, like the old design had. Works with Firefox and Chrome... I imagine all browsers would work.   You already have this design and functionality. Why you don't offer it makes no sense at all.    Here's what I have to do:   1. Log in to Constant Contact 2. Go to Campaigns or View All Campaigns 3. Begin the process of Copying an email by clicking Copy 4. It asks to name the copy, just click Next 5. Don't save anything, just click the Exit button in upper left area (ignore the warning to save your work) 6. This takes you back to Home.  Now click the Back button on your browser 7. Says Document Expired. So just refresh to resubmit form 8. Now you get a clean list of all emails, with pagination at the bottom.   Why do you make this so hard, Constant Contact? You have this functionality already built, but you hide it on purpose? Make us click "View more Campaigns" a hundred times to see emails from a year ago? Makes no sense at all, doesn't seem like your new design was created by someone who actually manages and sends emails.   ... View more

I think you're right.  But I think it's a necessary evil, so to speak, unless you can think of an alternate way for those "bounces" to be indicated.  As the system stands, those instances need to be dropped into the Bounce categories just to let you know that information is being passed back by the server.  If it's not dropped into Bounces, then you won't know about it--given how the system currently functions.   And don't you want to know who has had their email account sent to Vacation/Auto Reply for the past year?  We have a person who's had her account set that way more often than not over the past eight years, but we know her personally, and we know she's opening those emails promptly.  So she gets a pass.  If we don't know someone whose email is "bouncing" as Vacation over and over, we like to see it in the bounces so that we know about it.  Perhaps that person isn't even getting to those emails, and absent any other knowledge about them, we may decide to remove them from our account after a few months.   As for the inaccuracy that brings to the overall Bounce rate, we simply don't care.  It's a fraction of a percent for us.   Michael ... View more

Project Manager: Our new interface will be clean and sleek.  Discuss. Design Team: These page numbers are so old school, and I'll bet they're hard for mobile users to click on.  Let's do something else here, like a View More. Engineering: Huh... Yeah, we could do that. Functional Consultants: ... Design Team: Hey, where'd the functional guys go? Project Manager: Too many delays tinkering through their test scripts. We got rid of them four years ago. Design Team and Engineering: Ah, yes, we can almost remember that party!  But it sure would help to have their input on this View More thing. Project Manager: Well, how problematic for real users could such a little design change be?  Instead of all those ugly page numbers, they just have one thing to click.  Might have to do a couple of clicks, but surely that's all there is to it. Engineering: Yeah, give us the specs, we're good to go. ... View more

Any campaigns you had in your account prior to 2013 have been deleted.  As for the Jump-to-Page, I agree. ... View more

No.  But I'm lucky we usually just do a monthly newsletter.  Organizations that do weekly or daily (and I won't even think about those that do more than one a day) must find it impossible to act like professionals.  I export six months worth of Sents and Opens; import into Access after some editing; compile everything after some more editing; and run a query to identify those who were sent the prior six newsletters but who opened none of them.  Ok, I admit it, it's such a pain that I sometimes do it only once a year instead of every six months.   Michael ... View more

If they create a template with three images in a table, what happens when they are upgraded to the Next Generation Editor? Will that template still be available for them and will it work properly?   Michael ... View more

What are you doing on YOUR end to investigate the slowness that a lot of users are experiencing? ... View more

I don't question the date.  I question the reason for removing the older emails at all.  Helping us stay organized doesn't sound like an important enough reason to me.  So I thought there might be something else.  Is there?   Michael ... View more

You might want to point out to customers that copying the old campaigns to retain them as drafts won't save their performance data along with the copies.  If we want to keep records on Sents, Opens, Clicks, etc, we'll need to do a little more work.   If we can file old emails away in custom folders already, why do they need to be removed to help us stay organized, as the blog describes it?  Is there another reason?   Thanks, Michael ... View more

My nonprofit is on the old, or one of the old, releases.  How many different versions are in production, anyway?   I've read that CTCT has a goal of moving all older accounts to the most recent system by the end of the year.  Does that apply to our account, or is all this about an entirely different kind of CTCT system that we aren't subscribed to?   Forgive my confusion; your documentation leaves a little to be desired.   Let me know, please.  We have a ten-year history in our account, and I've been trying to prepare our E.D. (who designs and sends our e-newsletters, but who doesn't read these forums) for changes that are on the way.  If I need to make copies of everything going back to 2006, I'll have to get on that.   Michael ... View more

You mean you don't like spending 6 hours running multiple exports, making corrections to the field names, importing into an Access database, designing 30 make-table and append queries to do your basic reporting and list culling?   Me neither.   Michael ... View more

Think about programming as much flexibility as you can into custom user settings.  It would benefit more users if User A could select a default of Email Address - Work, while User B could select a default of Email Address - Home.    Think strategically.  Think like a system user.   Michael ... View more

What's the programming problem here?  Why isn't it simply fixed instead of opened for voting? ... View more

This is such an important thing, it should be prioritized very highly.  Very, very highly. ... View more

egads! 1.33 down 0.87 up   brb, need to stir the fire in my cave ... View more

I vote yes but with the request that we may choose our default.  I'd like the default to be Home. ... View more

Ok then. Please fix the standard-birthday-field-export problem asap.   Michael ... View more

Voting Open? Seriously? The problem (and it is a PROBLEM, not an ISSUE) is your failure to keep up with proper documentation, so that users can depend on the help files. And without acknowledging that problem, you set these comments as open to voting, as though whether you'll do the right thing depends on how many people request it.   It's one thing to make changes to the system and put new versions into production that change or completely do away with tools, features, and processes that people found highly useful; and then when users complain in the Communty and sugget reinstating said features, you open it to voting as though it's an original, good new idea, at the same time you ask those community members to further explain what it is they want to do, how they want to do it--when they just made it clear that what they want to do and how they want to do it is exactly what they did and how they did it just before an upgrade changed things. That's one thing, which we have seen a lot of over the past few years. A different thing is failing to properly document your system changes in the help files so that people can keep up, and then setting a complaint or question about it to Voting Open.   Fix the help files or pack it in.   Michael ... View more

If he creates a custom field in which to enter birthdates, and re-keys or uploads the data there, will that field appear as an option to select when he prepares an export?   Michael ... View more