Sending Email in GC Outreach: Failures, Retries, and What to Do About Bounces

Overview

When you send emails through GiveCampus Outreach, not every email reaches its destination on the first try. Some emails bounce immediately, others get delayed temporarily, and most deliver successfully. This article explains what happens when an email can't be delivered and what you should do about it.

How Email Delivery Works

GiveCampus uses SendGrid to deliver your emails. When you hit send, your email goes through several stages:

Email Statuses You'll See

• Pending – Not sent yet
• Submitted – Handed off to SendGrid, in the process of sending
• Sent – Successfully delivered to the recipient's inbox
• Opened – Recipient opened the email
• Clicked – Recipient clicked a link in the email
• Bounced – Email was rejected (usually a bad email address)
• Spam Reported – Recipient marked the email as spam

FAQ — why does the delivered count look very low right after I click send?

• When you click Send (or when a scheduled send fires), GiveCampus sends emails in batches rather than handing all emails to SendGrid at once. The delivered count in the metrics screen updates as each group is processed.

• Right after sending, the delivered count may appear much lower than your total recipient count (for example, 4 out of 389). This is expected because the send is still in progress.

• Wait a few minutes after triggering a send before drawing conclusions. For very large lists, processing may take longer. If the delivered count remains unexpectedly low after 30–60 minutes, check for persistent issues such as bounced addresses, invalid domains, or exclusions that would permanently reduce the delivered total.

• To check detailed metrics and per-recipient status:

  • Click the outreach name in the Outreach list to open the summary screen with key stats including Status, Total Recipients, Excluded Recipients, Click Through Rate, Open Rate, Send Rate, Bounce Rate, Conversions, Unsubscribes, and Unsubscribe Topic.
  • Use the View Full Metrics button for a complete breakdown.
  • To export a per-recipient status report, go to the Outreach section in your admin navigation and select the Recipients tab.

• If a send seems stuck after 30–60 minutes:

  1. Check the outreach status on the summary screen (Sending means it’s still in progress; Sent means it’s complete).
  2. Download the Outreach Recipient Report and review the Status column for any bounced or failed entries.
  3. Rerun the report and review timestamps to confirm whether additional batches have completed.

What Happens When Delivery Fails

There are two main types of delivery failures:

1. Deferrals (Temporary Failures)

A deferral happens when the recipient's email server can't accept your email right now, but might be able to later. Common causes:

• The recipient's inbox is full
• The email provider's server is down or overloaded
• The server is temporarily blocking your IP address due to high volume

What GiveCampus Does: SendGrid automatically retries delivery for up to 72 hours using an exponential backoff algorithm (meaning more time passes between each retry attempt). Most deferred emails eventually get delivered.

When a retry succeeds, the email status changes to Sent. During retries, the email remains in the Submitted state and is not marked as Bounced. Only a permanent rejection triggers a Bounced status.

What You Should Do: Nothing. Deferrals usually resolve themselves. Keep these contacts on your list.

2. Bounces (Permanent Failures)

A bounce happens when an email is permanently rejected. Common causes:

• Invalid or non-existent email address
• The domain doesn't exist
• The recipient's server has permanently blocked delivery

What You Should Do: Remove bounced email addresses from your list. They won't work, and continuing to send to them can hurt your sender reputation.

Why high bounce rates sometimes happen with imported data

Imported email lists often include outdated records. This isn’t a delivery issue with GiveCampus; it’s a data hygiene challenge. Your first campaign after a migration can reveal the quality of the new list.

What this means for your outreach:

• Expect it: The initial campaign may expose outdated records that no longer reach recipients.
• Re‑apply suppressions: Legacy filters aren’t automatically transferred. You need to identify and remove previously suppressed or invalid addresses.

Practical steps to reduce bounce impact:

1. Test a small sample: Send to 1–2% of your contacts or a few hundred records to gauge your bounce rate before committing the full list.
2. Review campaign reports: Wait 72 hours for deferrals to resolve, then remove persistent hard bounces.
3. Segment risky contacts: Separate domains or contact types that consistently bounce until you can verify their details.
4. Cross-reference with your CRM: Compare bounced addresses in GiveCampus with your CRM and suppression lists to ensure they remain suppressed.
5. Clean your lists regularly: After a migration, perform an initial cleanup and schedule periodic reviews to maintain list quality.

Recommended Actions for Your Team

After Each Campaign

1. Wait 72 hours to allow deferrals to resolve to either sent or bounced 
2. Review your email report in GiveCampus for bounced contacts
3. Remove hard bounces from future sends (these addresses won't work)
4. Monitor spam reports and consider removing those contacts or adjusting your content

Best Practices

• Clean your email lists regularly to remove old or invalid addresses
• Watch for patterns (e.g., multiple bounces from the same domain might indicate a broader issue)
• Don't immediately remove contacts who had a single deferral (their server might have just been temporarily down). This is why you should wait the full 72 hours.

Current Limitations

Right now, GiveCampus doesn't have a dedicated report for pulling bounced email addresses across all outreaches (like we do for the Invalid Numbers report for GC Outreach Texting). This means you'll need to manually review outreach results to identify bounces.

Solution: Export your email campaign results and filter for bounced statuses, then cross-reference with your constituent database.