The Oakland Bar Association founded Oakland Mediation Center in 1989 to serve the surrounding community in Oakland County, MI. Lawyers, educators, and volunteers support the center’s mission by offering mediation, education, and legal services to those in need.
Open rate YOY: +4%
Click-through rate YOY: +2%
Contact List Growth YOY: 2.9%
Feature they can’t live without: Email builder and events
The center’s team spent its early years relying on print, word-of-mouth, and manual email marketing to promote their services. Looking for ease and automation, Charity Burke, then a volunteer and now Executive Director, watched as the center adopted Constant Contact 15 years ago.
“We thought we were doing really well when we transitioned from [manual email management] to Excel spreadsheets, and then we found Constant Contact, which just automates everything,” said Charity.
Since then, the platform has evolved alongside their digital marketing needs. Constant Contact’s feature set helps them increase efficiency, promote list growth, and inform a wider audience.
Email builder and AI content generator
Email is the center’s primary marketing medium. They use Constant Contact’s email builder to design engaging and beautiful campaigns. Shelby Paye, Brand and Communications Team Lead, is in the product often. Using the tool’s drag-and-drop functionality, templates, and BrandKit feature, Shelby has said Constant Contact “makes it very easy to build an aesthetically pleasing email.”
Besides design features, the email builder gives the team access to an AI content generator, helping them get off a blank page. “I love the AI content generator. I use it to help me elaborate on what I want to talk about. I even use it for posting on social media,” said Shelby. “Having different settings where you can select a professional, informative, or enthusiastic tone is very helpful to play around with.”
Collecting donations and hosting events
To support their work, the center takes on volunteers, accepts donations, and offers educational courses and seminars. “We market a lot of our training and donation requests via Constant Contact,” said Charity.
Email communications about charitable giving holidays, like Giving Tuesday, bring in necessary funding while event tool access manages programming like roundtables, mediator training, workshops, and clinics.
“It’s a really easy and very convenient way to set up an event and send registration the link out,” Charity said.
Custom landing pages, registration pages, confirmation emails, and reporting make their email and event marketing processes easy to manage on both sides of the inbox. “People just sign up, and we look at our reports on registrations, seeing who’s paid and who hasn’t,” Charity remarked.
List growth
A healthy email list means Oakland Mediation Center can provide their community with the information and resources they need to support themselves and their conflict resolution. “We’re always looking to grow our program and build relationships,” said Charity. To grow their list, their team uses event contact information and email collected from a sign-up form embedded into their website. In the last year, Oakland Mediation Center’s email list has grown 2.9%.
Segmentation and automation
To communicate with clients, attorneys, mediators, and volunteers, the center relies on automation and segmentation tools from Constant Contact. Segmentation through lists, segments of a list, and tags keep communications organized and ready to reach the right audience.
“We’re inviting specific audiences, so we use different lists, and it’s very easy to just click out to who you want to send it to, and it works its magic,” Charity said.
First-time communications with the center, like receiving a welcome email, are swift. Having configured an automated path, the center sends welcome emails to new subscribers on any list, making sure they receive a proper introduction to their organization.
Reporting
Campaign reporting means the center doesn’t have to operate on assumption alone. Constant Contact’s reporting feature includes data collected to determine list health and email engagement, as well as event management and fundraising. From click-throughs and opens to registration data, the team can determine campaign successes and what needs to be improved while in the product.
“I like to look at the dashboard and see how many people are opening and clicking through. Then I can adjust the sent time to see how much it will change the results,” said Shelby.
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Using email and events to connect clients and community
Oakland Mediation Center has spent over thirty years educating and connecting clients to high-quality mediation services. To support their marketing efforts, they invested in Constant Contact, bringing digital to the forefront of how they communicate. From email to events, the team at Oakland Mediation Center is able to easily communicate and engage with their audiences by providing information that is both personalized and engaging.
