Marketing Automation Platform

The vendor is required to provide marketing automation platform, the university is looking to achieve the following objectives;
• Increasing our efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability
o Leverage integration of ai for content creation, journey building/optimization, and predictive insights
o Automation and automated workflows
o Drip campaigns
o Native email template building – i.e., in platform
o Easy access to expanded metrics and reporting
• Create a more personally relevant end-to-end digital experience
o Personalized user journey mapping
o Dynamic audience building based on user behavior
o Omni-channel functionality (email, SMS, and ideally WhatsApp)
o Expanded dynamic conditional fields for mass personalization
• Enhance our subscriber lists and deliverability
o Ability to subscribe to email programs from the web through sign-up forms.
o Understanding engagement factors and who isn’t opening our emails.
o A/b/c/d testing.
o Ensure our emails consistently land in user inboxes, not spam folders.
- Some key challenges with our current platform:
• Complex integration with Blackbaud CRM resulting in data cleanliness issues.
• The process of designing, building, testing and sending an email is very manual. 
• We currently design and build emails in a separate, more user-friendly platform and then migrate to our email marketing platform to test and send.
• Building custom audiences is currently challenging with static lists being pulled and manually imported.
• There is no omni-channel digital communication opportunity, only email.
• Lack of personalization opportunity due to little integration between user actions and that information being carried through into the current system.
• Limited marketing automation capabilities.
• Time-consuming and non-scalable review and send processes.
• No ai capability.
• Limited access to constituent profile data within platform.
• Comparatively expensive, when used for email marketing alone.
- Material disclosures
• The platform is required to be cloud-based; the university will not entertain on-premises hosted solutions.
• The platform should have omni-channel functionality (email, SMS, ideally WhatsApp)
• The platform’s web-based user interface is fully compatible with all major browsers across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices.
• Integration with Blackbaud CRM:
o Seamless data exchange: enable smooth two-way data flow between the platform and Blackbaud CRM, with the ability to modify the data model easily—without requiring complex operations—to satisfy CRM data requirements.
o Flexible system roles: support for both platform-initiated and CRM-initiated interactions, allowing either system to serve as the active operator depending on the integration use case.
o Configurable data retrieval: provide robust configuration options for connecting to Blackbaud CRM through multiple methods.
• The platform should support robust roles and permissions management to enable secure, distributed enterprise use.
• The platform should adhere to the Canadian anti-spam legislation (CASL) requirements.
• The platform should offer a secure, open, and extensible API that supports integration with external systems.
• The platform should include comprehensive data migration capabilities.
• Data engineering or migration services should be considered essential during the implementation phase.
• The platform should operate in a secure and accessible domain, with strong protections against cyber threats, malware, and unauthorized access.
- Contract Period/Term: 3 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: June 20, 2025