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Guidance for Personalized Donor Emails with Amazon Pinpoint

Overview

This Guidance showcases how nonprofits can personalize emails to donors with templates provided by Amazon Pinpoint. As one of the most important aspects of fundraising, personalizing engagement with donors is critical for nonprofits. Nonprofits can use this Guidance to implement customization, including personalizing the name of the donor, organization, and color schemes. The Guidance also automatically tracks performance metrics, which are used to create dashboards in the Amazon Pinpoint console.

How it works

This architecture displays how a nonprofit organization can send personalized emails to donors. Email templates are customized and performance metrics are tracked automatically through dashboards in the Amazon Pinpoint console.

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Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

To help gain insights into your email marketing campaigns, the CloudFormation template can be used to create multiple email templates in Amazon Pinpoint. You can use these templates to perform A/B testing of email messages. Performance metrics are tracked automatically, and are used to create dashboards in the Amazon Pinpoint console.

The CloudFormation templates are used only at design time when creating campaigns, and they are fully editable by the designer, allowing you to integrate and deploy changes to email campaigns.

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AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is used for authenticating users' credentials, and use of multifactor-authentication through policy enforcement is recommended. Role-based policies are used to ensure resource access and authentication are protected.

All service data is taken out of the CloudFormation templates. Also, no user or personal information is included in the CloudFormation templates. Instead, Amazon Pinpoint users load personal information into Amazon Pinpoint through a separate process. The email templates that are created in this Guidance use tags to populate the message body when necessary.

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By creating a CloudFormation template to deploy the personalized email architecture, it can be quickly replicated into multiple AWS Regions. Because Amazon Pinpoint configurations aren’t shared across Regions, the CloudFormation template makes it possible to create active-active or warm standby architectures, which are resilient to connectivity issues or large-scale events.

For a reliable application-level architecture with loosely coupled dependencies, this Guidance decouples the storage of data from compute. Additionally, all user data is separated from the email template data. 

Amazon S3 provides 11 9s (99.999999999%) of durability as well as 4 9s (99.99%) of availability for all stored data by redundantly storing data across multiple physically separated AWS Availability Zones. 

The Amazon S3 bucket is behind a CloudFront distribution to ensure resilience and data availability during large email campaigns. 

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The email templates installed through this Guidance improve performance by reducing the amount of hands-on time required to create templates for email communications. Amazon Pinpoint and Lambda are purpose-built for this Guidance. 

Most services used in this Guidance including: Amazon S3, Amazon Pinpoint, Lambda, CloudFront, and CloudFormation offer AWS Free Tier that can be used to experiment and fine-tune the Guidance configurations.

All services are Regionally available. Select a Region that is close to the target audience for improved performance and reduced latency. 

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All the services used in this Guidance incur cost only for what is used. There is no cost for deploying the CloudFormation stack into multiple AWS Regions. The CloudFormation template deploys resources that incur no costs until they are used. You can use this architecture to create a multi-Region system without incurring extra costs.

CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN), along with all the services used to build this architecture, provide automatic scalability to meet various types of demands.

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This Guidance is serverless, and requires no upfront provisioning of resources, eliminating hardware and capacity planning. It offloads all undifferentiated heavy lifting and service management to AWS. As AWS moves services to a more optimized and sustainable infrastructure, users automatically become contributors to sustainability.

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Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.