Happy New Year!

What's coming from AfA.

We wanted to kick off the year with a short roundup of what's new in the Engagement Tracker, and to set the tone for these semi-occasional updates you'll receive whenever we ship improvements worth noting.

Please feel free to forward this email to others in your organisation who use our tools but may not yet be in direct contact with us, so they can subscribe as well.

Over the past quarter, we've been steadily improving the Engagement Tracker with a series of small but meaningful new features. At the same time, we've been speaking with organisations across the animal advocacy movement to better understand the challenges, bottlenecks, and ideas that could improve efficiency and impact. It's been a real pleasure meeting and onboarding so many of you along the way.

We look forward to releasing more features for the Engagement Tracker and more tools to support the movement in the near future.

✨ What's new

Custom Mail Merge Columns

We've made it much easier to further customise your mail merge emails by adding the option to create new columns, which allows you to include more information about your email list.

AI Feature with Mail Merge Columns

You can now include these new columns as context for the AI prompt within your mail merges, meaning you can send personalised, context-rich emails to your email lists. Further information here.

We see a lot of potential in this feature. Any feedback on how you are using it or how it can be improved would be welcome.

Stop "first-read" emails from being triggered

You may have noticed that occasionally, the first tracking event is your own view of your tracked email. We've released a lightweight Chrome extension that prevents this entirely for emails tracked with the Engagement Tracker. 👉 Get the extension.

🔍 Help us shape what's next

We are starting validation for our next tool and would love your input. We're pressure-testing a familiar post-event problem: volunteer interest is captured, but follow-up is delayed, and momentum is lost.

If you're able to spare 1 minute, your input via a short survey (5 multiple-choice questions) would be genuinely valuable and helps us understand how common and painful this is across the movement. 👉 Take the survey.

🤝 We're here to help

As always, we're here to support you. We aim to be a highly responsive and reactive team. Whether you've run into an issue, have a feature request, or want to talk through how you're using the tool, you can reach out to us at any point and we'll do our best to help.

We're excited to continue working alongside you throughout 2026.

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Peter & Hereward
Active for Animals