Send a Proof

An important step in creating a mailing or a survey is ensuring the content is approved by the necessary contacts and staff members and as a final check for any mistakes.

You can send a proof to any combination of staff accounts, staff groups, proof lists, distribution lists, and distribution list available addresses, and then view the results of the proof from the Proofing tab. See .

After a reviewer has approved or rejected the proof, the assigned staff member will receive a Mailing Proof Response Notification or a Survey Proof Response Notification. Both notifications can be customized using message templates found in the Administrator Notifications message type under the Outreach or Feedback category respectively. See .

Proof surveys and mailings are subject to the following behaviors and limitations.

• If your message contains conditional sections, all conditional sections display in the proof message. However, reviewers see the conditional sections only if they can be mapped to contact records that allow access to those conditional sections.

• If a form on the proof contains an email address field and a reviewer submits a value for the field in the survey preview, a contact record is created or updated so that advanced survey functions can be tested. For this reason, be sure that your reviewers use only test contact addresses to avoid updating production contacts when testing survey proofs.

• To ensure the proofing process does not impact statistics after the mailing or survey has been sent, Outreach and Feedback does not retain data submitted from proof surveys. If you want to submit test responses without impacting specific statistics, you can copy the mailing or survey and test using the copy instead.

For the best practice about sending proofs, see Send Proofs to Key Staff.

1. From an open mailing or survey, click the Proofing tab.
2. Click Send Proof Message to select proof recipients.
   The Send Proof Message window opens.

   Tip: From the Summary tab, clicking Send Proof Message opens the Send Proof Wizard where you can select the survey you want to send for a proof, and then follow the wizard as it steps you through the process of sending your message.
3. To create a proof list, click New Proof List and see .
4. Enter an email address or the name of a group or proof list in the Recipients field.
5. To select proof recipients from a list, click the Select Recipients icon (to the right of the Recipients field). The Select Names window opens.
   1. Select a staff member, address, group, or proof list and click To.
   2. To find a specific staff member, address, group, or proof list, enter the name in the Type Name or Select From List field.
      The first item matching the letters you type is selected in the grid.
   3. To import your contacts from the default Contacts folder in Outlook, select Load Outlook Contacts. This is useful for displaying contacts that are not included in . See .
   4. Click OK.
6. Enter any comments you want to appear in the message in the Comment text box.
7. To spell check your comments, click the Spell Check icon (to the right of the Comment field).
8. To customize your proof message by contact record, which lets your reviewers see how dynamic content will look for a specific contact, click the Search icon next to the Preview Contact field on the bottom of the window. The Contact Search window opens.
   1. Enter your search criteria in one or more of the available fields and click Search.
      A list of contacts that match your search criteria displays in the grid below the search criteria fields.
   2. Select a contact and click Select.
      The Contact Search window closes and the contact name you selected populates the Preview Contact field on the Send Message Proof window.
9. Click Send Proof Message.