The Relentless Pursuit | July 2020

Before we break for a long holiday weekend, I want you to know that the amount of hard work you’ve been putting in over the last quarter is not lost on me. And I really hope you take this time to relax.

And just after the holiday is July 6 – the first day of our first phase in returning to the office. As hard as it’s been at times, I’ve got to admit I think we’ve learned and grown a lot because of the pandemic and our shift to a remote workplace. For me personally, becoming a better communicator was something I desperately wanted to focus on but struggled to. The pandemic sure changed that fast… that and plenty of other things. And I’m sure more change will come over the next several weeks and months. So please continue to come to me with any questions or concerns you have. My door (whether it be virtual or physical!) is always open.

Now let’s get to what you all have accomplished last month.

IN THIS EDITION

• WesTech + Accounting Update
• Shadow Apps
• Support Updates
• Affiliate Mapping
• 500M Mailings & Counting
• ELI5 | MimeCast
• Data Literacy Podcasts
• Affiliate Spotlight Series
• Q3 OKRs
• Deliverability Summit
• Vendor Score Card

-Daryl

WESTECH AND ACCOUNTING UPDATES COMING IN AUGUST

As we continue to pursue opportunities to improve processes and operate more efficiently, we’re working to streamline some of our everyday Accounting tasks by absorbing them under the Planning & Business Performance team. A few members of the PBP team have been working with the Accounting team to get trained with the goal to transition a few basic responsibilities by August. Functions and tasks that are best left with the Accounting team, will of course stay there.

Come August, all WesTech-related accounting tasks below will be directed to Danni Yan and  Brian Scheeler.

Accounting Tasks to be Transitioned to Danni and Brian:

• Invoicing
• Allocations
• Concur Expense Approvals
• Financial Reporting

It’s good to note that when the time comes for the switch to become “official,” all invoices and approvals will still be sent to wtinvoices@14west.us. And 14 West Accounts Payable (ap@14west.us) will still be responsible for payment processing,

You’ll receive a friendly reminder and some additional details on this as we get closer to August. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to contact Brian Scheeler.

FOUND A NEW APP? HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

We’ve all done this. Sometimes you find an app that seems to be user-friendly, ties into your workflow nicely, and may even be free to use. And if it’s not free, you may even get your manager’s buy-in so that your team can use the tool. These are called “Shadow Apps,” which means they are not supported by IT and InfoSec at the company.

Although shadow apps can improve productivity and collaboration with little or no financial cost to your team or company, there are risks involved. Most importantly, you’re keeping the teams who work to keep our systems secure (within IT and InfoSec) in the dark. These applications may not have the right secure procedures in place, they may be blocked from our systems, or could alter the other systems we depend on. In some cases, we may already have this application on our systems or have an application that has the same capabilities, but require a bit of training.

We want to make sure you have the right systems in place to get your job done, so when you find a new application or have been using a tool that we did not provide, feel free to reach out to sysops@14west.us. We’ll do the research (if we haven’t already) so you don’t have to.

• 14 West System Operations team

THE LATEST FROM SUPPORT

Support has been focused on our continued evolution in both enhancements and purpose of the team. I wanted to share our top initiatives this month.

INCREASED TRANSPARENCY | Affiliates are now receiving monthly Support Summaries that offer a data-focused recap of the month. In addition to providing more visibility, we have worked to establish a consistent feedback loop with the Product teams. With this, we’ve encouraged the affiliates to send us feedback or enhancement ideas which has been critical to our success and allows us to provide consistent and needed support.

UPDATED SLAs | We have made several adjustments to our existing SLAs and will send a document outlining all of our SLAs and the adjustments once completed. In the meantime, we’re proud to say that we’ve decreased 6 of our existing SLAs, ensuring a quicker turnaround time. We’re also up and running with our Blueshift support and have now established the first of many Blueshift-centric categories. This is something we regularly keep watch of and will make further adjustments as we focus on our own in-house efficiencies.

• Brent Quickel, Manager of MarTech Support

UNDERSTANDING AFFILIATES FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

In order for us to provide intuitive support and offer the best applications for the affiliates, we have to really understand how they interact with our systems instead of how we think they use them. Since we can’t exactly shadow each client, the PUMA team has designed and developed Affiliate Journey Maps and Affiliate Personas to show where their pain points are, what systems they use, and much more. These are living documents that we plan to update quarterly, as things move quickly around here and we need to continuously evolve with the affiliates.

Understanding where the affiliates are coming from can really show us if we’re meeting their expectations, and how to improve. We hope you take the time to check them out, and if you have any questions or feedback on these tools, please reach out to me directly.

• Judy Bluhm, Product Manager, Platform for User-Centric Marketing Applications

HELL YEAH | ANOTHER BLUESHIFT MILESTONE

As of this week, we’ve officially hit over half a billion mailings sent through Blueshift, which accounts for 40% of mailings sent overall (domestic and international).

A QUICK NOTE | You can see this pinboard and many other data metrics – that are as beautiful as they are informative – on ThoughtSpot. For access or questions on this application, please reach out to Rachel Kozloski.

ELI5 | MIMECAST

It has been over a year since we switched our email security gateway to Mimecast, so we wanted to give a refresher on what Mimecast has been doing and highlight one of its key features.

On average, Mimecast analyzes over 50,000 email messages per day for spam, misleading links, and phishing attempts. The protection this service offers has been a gamechanger and has kept large volumes of unwanted emails from reaching users. Email security will always be a fight because, as defenses improve, so do attacks that attempt to circumvent them. Mimecast has allowed us to be proactive and prepared for anything new we may encounter.

One way that we have adapted our security to confront current and future risks is by instituting Mimecast’s URL Protection policy, which could affect the links you create with false positives.

This policy has been active since we implemented Mimecast, and has provided an extra layer of protection and visibility for incoming emails. URL Protection applies to all emails that were sent to an internal mailbox from an external source (for example, from gmail.com to 14west.us).  If the message meets that mail flow criteria, Mimecast will automatically scan the message for hyperlinks as it comes through. It will then “hijack” all links within the message and redirect them to a Mimecast landing page for the user to investigate.

The purpose of this landing page is to explain to the user that the link leads to an external source and shows the exact URL that the link is pointing to.  A common practice of phishing emails is to provide a link that appears to go somewhere legitimate, but it instead leads to a malicious website used to steal credentials or force a download with payloads attached.

Spoofing a hyperlink is very easy, as I was able to do here in about 30 seconds:  www.google.com.  If you notice in that link, despite it saying “www.google.com,” the link actually points to “https://bing.com.” Had this message been sent from an external source, Mimecast would’ve hijacked the message and showed that it was pointing somewhere different than the message stated.  Once you have reviewed the link and determined that the destination is what you expected and safe to visit, you can then continue to the original link that was sent without the Mimecast landing URL appended to it. While Mimecast does hijack the link at first, nothing about the link is changed if you decide to continue past the landing page.

Since we have a high volume of messages being sent from third party services and other external sources, false positives are inevitable with this system.  To combat these false positives, we have a separate URL Protection “whitelist” that we can add domains and URLs into.  This whitelist currently features all of our internal domains as well as a large number of known subdomains.  Other URLs can be added into this list for business purposes if needed.  In the event that you have an internal URL being hijacked that is causing business disruption, send an email to help@14west.us to create a ticket and it will be addressed quickly.  We want URL Protection to function as much as possible, because unfortunately there are dangerous emails that will slip through the cracks of our filters.  URL Protection gives that extra padding to ensure our users do not fall victim to these attacks and help increase awareness.

You can read more about URL Protection policy here.

If you have any questions about the URL Protection, or any other Mimecast policies, please contact the InfoSec team at security@14west.us and we will be happy to assist.

• Steve Graziano, Sr InfoSec Engineer

DATA: DRIVE WITH CONFIDENCE

The BI and L&D teams have been hard at work this past month launching our data literacy initiative called, Data: Drive with Confidence. We want everyone to understand data concepts and to have the confidence to read, work with, analyze, and argue with data.

As part of our awareness campaign, we have gone live with our first podcast series. Each episode digs into why data matters and how it can be instrumental for companies in the midst of digital transformation.

Each podcast is 15 minutes or less and perfect for in between meetings. If you haven’t gotten to listen in yet, you can start here.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO HEAR NEXT? | We are taking suggestions for topics for our next podcast series to launch late summer.   Provide suggestions and feedback here.

A QUICK NOTE | Data: Drive with Confidence podcast series is hosted on our new LMS platform, Evolve. If you have any questions about Evolve or have issues with access, please email evolve@14west.us and one of the LMS experts will quickly assist you.

COMING SOON | On demand Data Literacy learning modules for all new hires and all current employees, interactive micro-learning opportunities, and on demand tools training.

• Bojo Bauer, Manager, BI Customer Success
• Beth Oertel, Instructional Designer, L&D

JULY AFFILIATE SPOTLIGHT SERIES | MONEY MAP PRESS

On Tuesday, July 21, our latest edition of the Affiliate Spotlight Series will feature a discussion with Katie Melchor, Executive Director of Ecommerce and Danni O’Dell, Executive Director of Finance & Ops for Money Map Press. They are planning to give a brief rundown of their roles and the strong relationship Money Map has with their customers, but they’re opening up this time to answer any and all of your questions.

We think this is a great opportunity to really get to know how a financial publication works and to hear straight from an affiliate regarding how they handle major projects and their day-to-day. Q&A will happen live, but to make sure we get your questions covered, we have a sheet right here for you to jot them down.

A LITTLE EXTRA TIME FOR YOUR Q3 OKRs

Due to our integrated planning sessions happening right now, we understand that these may affect your Q3 OKRs. We want you to be able to seamlessly develop your OKRs through our planning sessions, so we have made a few tweaks to extend the time to complete them. These are due to be wrapped up the third week of July. So while Q3 OKRs would normally be done much earlier, we are giving more time this quarter to allow you to make the changes you need.

Of course, if you are not a team impacted by integrated planning, we would ask that you input your Q3 OKRs as soon as possible! For any help needed please contact Planning & OKR’s!

DELIVERABILITY SUMMIT

Thank you for those who were able to join at least one of the virtual sessions for our first ever Deliverability Summit last week. For those who didn’t, we have each session located in the Email Deliverability Workspace here. If you have any issues with access, please reach out to the L&D team here.

The presenters and teams involved in this event are strong thought leaders on the subject of Deliverability today, so we hope you found the sessions insightful and learned a bit more about how important this subject matter is for our affiliates.

For any questions or feedback on this summit, you can reach out to me directly.

• Matt Estes, Manager of Learning & Development

VENDOR SCORECARD | GETTING TO KNOW YOUR SOURCES

With ThoughtSpot, you can now analyze mailing data down to the individual subscriber.  This level of granularity allows us to ask questions of our data that were not possible to answer before, and all within seconds of asking.

If you are already in ThoughtSpot, you’ll notice that a pinboard called the Vendor Scorecard has recently been shared with you. This pinboard helps you evaluate new lead sources by highlighting engagement rates during subscribers first days on your list. The pinboard looks at the unique percent of engaged subscribers during their first seven days on file to their first thirty, so that you can decide early on if a source of names is going to be good for your business.

For more information, or if you are not a ThoughtSpot user, please reach out to BI at intel@14west.us and we’ll get you started.

• Rachel Kozloski, ThoughtSpot Product Owner