Montana Conservation Corps

About the Montana Conservation Corps

The mission of the Montana Conservation Corps (MCC) is to inspire young people through hands-on conservation service to be leaders, stewards of the land, and engaged citizens who improve their communities. They have hundreds of Americorps members (participants) every year that they select from a much larger pool of applicants. 

Pain Points

MCC was struggling with its email marketing tool (Constant Contact) and without clearly defined preferences or lists. They knew there was some cross-over with their Salesforce CRM but weren’t sure all constituents were synching to the marketing tool, or being properly segmented based on their prior engagement (logged in Salesforce). Additionally, there was a series of emails that were being manually sent to newly accepted program participants—the manual nature of it required building and maintaining lists in Salesforce as participants were accepted. Attrition before the start date was something MCC dealt with and was trying to prevent by engaging them through this email series. Sometimes participants were accepted after the email series began (60 days from the start date) and would need to be manually added to the appropriate lists which meant a lot of room for error. 

Solution

Pedal Lucid (PL) started working with MCC in 2023 on a Campaign Monitor <> Salesforce marketing integration. Campaign Monitor has a robust and well-thought-out Salesforce integration that allows MCC  to do basic segmentation from Salesforce, while gracefully handling preferences and opt-outs in either system. Once MCC was comfortable in the new system, PL later helped them build journey automation that would send a series of welcome emails to program participants based on their start date and other variables in Salesforce. There were unique challenges with participants being accepted after the series had already started that automation handled nicely over the manual steps previously required.

Outcome

MCC is clear that all their constituents are on their marketing lists and properly segmented. The lists are synching two ways from Campaign Monitor to Salesforce so that reporting can happen in either system (giving non-marketing staff visibility into whether someone is on a list or not). Constituents can manage their preferences rather than blanket opt-out—something PL suggests so that organizations don’t lose critical constituents during periods of heavy marketing (i.e. end of year appeals). 

Programmatically, staff are confident that incoming participants are being engaged as they approach their start dates. The sequence is adapted to appropriately handle late applicants who were accepted after the email series has begun, which means applicants receive equal messaging regardless of timeline.