Virtual Community

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

crpf — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:16:00 GMT

We use GetActive or should I say Convio, because GetActive was just bought by them. It's simple to use and send mail in both html and text. We also use them to process our online donations.

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

madiro — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:26:00 GMT

I am actually the editor of our Head Start program's monthly newsletter. I am currently using the templates from microsoft online which are free, but the only problem is that there are not that many to choose from. The newsletter is sent electronically to all staff, policy council and to our board of directors. The information is also printed out and given to all of the families in our Head Start program. It has benefited our organization tremendously because it helps get important information out to everyone. The only challenges that I have experienced is getting information from all of the centers so that there is enough information to create a newsletter. As far as spending time on the newsletter, it has been at times, time consuming and at other times, I haven't had to spend much time completing the newsletter. It all depends on what template you use and what articles you receive for your newsletter. But in the end, it will be worth it.

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

madiro — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:08:00 GMT

Help! I need to find a newsletter template that will allow others in my agency to open. My IT Specialist put windows 97 on my computer but the problem is that everyone else has windows 2003 and cannot open the newsletter document. What is a good program that I can purchase that will allow them to open the document? I need a program that is easy to follow because I am not a computer expert. Please let me know which one is the best program. Thanks!!!!!

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

NPF_Chris — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:49:00 GMT

As an I.T. guy I too prefer plain text over HTML newsletters in every respect, but my mgmt like shiny, pretty things, so...

We went with Constant Contact as well and in general have been pleased with their performance. We've been especially fond of their open/click-through reports. We are seeking a new provider however because CC lacks any sort of "archive" function; their FAQs basically tell the customer "Do it yourself" and offer the suggestion to "View Source" and cut and paste. Helpful. Unfortunately it doesn't work, though, requiring us to manually re-code the entire newsletter. For us that has become a headache and a deal breaker, so off we go.

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

dawarpo — Thu, 31 May 2007 14:43:00 GMT

Our web host, Dreamhost, offers free hosting to nonprofits and includes a basic email list feature. They have an announcement list feature that lets you send plaintext or HTML emails, and you can format it to include the recipients' names.

The software includes opt-in verification (in fact, Dreamhost requires it), which is great.

What it doesn't offer is:
--clickthrough and open tracking
--multiple list management (you can have multiple lists, but you can't more people from one list to another).

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

LauraQuinn — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:29:00 GMT

Just wanted to give a link back to our detailed article on email newsletter tools, if it's useful. It's on TechSoup or there's an updated version on the Idealware website

Just a word about looking for email newsletter solutions, particularly when looking at free options: you need to be careful that you don't get yourself blacklisted as a spammer. If you're sending lots of emails from your own servers, using something like a PHP script, you run the risk of having all your email addresses flagged as a spammer. This would mean that every email sent from your organization email addresses - not just your newsletter, but everything - would be trapped, and not make it through to the intended recipient. It's not very likely, but really bad if it happens - it can take weeks or months to get off the blacklists.

Unless you're quite familiar with what you're doing, it's likely best to go with a hosted option for that reason (ConstantContact, Intellicontact, GraphicMail which have been listed are all hosted, or see the article for more). In addition to the few free hosted options (GraphicMail, for instance), there are tons of options for $20 a month or so. $20 isn't much of an investment compared to jumping through a lot of hoops every time you need to send out an email newsletter....

Laura
www.idealware.org

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

brianzig — Thu, 31 May 2007 05:11:00 GMT

I've been thinking of signing up with
Mailchimp

They aren't free, but seem to be easy to use. Anyone have any experience or thoughts on them?

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

Dermot — Thu, 31 May 2007 02:09:00 GMT

We use GraphicMail to send out a quarterly newsletter, and while it's free up to 10,000 sends, I find the editor VERY clunky, especially when trying to give it the look & feel of our website!

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

daanania — Wed, 30 May 2007 22:48:00 GMT

We use Groundspring too, but only because it's cheap. It's quite inflexible, and very difficult to handle unsubscribes because the constituent ID is not able to be loaded in the background, so when an email bounces, we have to manually look it up in our database.

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

billn722 — Wed, 30 May 2007 22:31:00 GMT

Adam,

And I thought I was the only Executive Director that did the HTML too. Its quite a challenge. Like me, you probably do the web site too. IT expertise is expensive, so small non-profits have to wing it.

We use Groundspring and have found it satisfactory and the price is right. Most of the alternatives are way too expensive.

Groundspring has the advantage of maintaining an opt-out list so we never inadvertently send that group another email.

Bill Newton
Executive Director
FL Consumer Action Network

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

metroteen — Wed, 30 May 2007 22:24:00 GMT

We've had pretty good luck with groundspring, although the actual work to put together the email works better if we create the emails with Dreamweaver first. Sadly, means that I'm the only person with HTML experience and therefore the only one who puts together our emails.

Ideally, it would be great to have a program that more staff could use and that didn't require such heavy formatting. I know it seems that some folks prefer plain text emails, but how many of us really read those?

-Adam Tenner
Executive Director
Metro TeenAIDS

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

Susan_Tenby — Sat, 26 May 2007 00:18:00 GMT

OK, so I am going to pile on to this topic, b/c it's one that has been asked in this forum over the years. Which tool is totally free to nonprofits, easy to use and administer and doesn't require a heavy-duty system to run? Any recommendations?

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

iwrc — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:42:00 GMT

We send a personalized monthly newsletter to our members, plus periodic updates about password changes, training classes, etc. Our list contains about 1000 email addresses.

I've been trying out Groundspring as an alternative to using Outlook/Word mail merge. Although I love the reports, I have been unimpressed with their tech support. I realize they do not support HTML, but even when trying to get help with a very simple plain text mailing, the "tech support" person was unable to understand my question, let alone provide a solution.

Sigh... Maybe we'll try Intellicontact or one of the others mentioned here next. Any other suggestions/referrals are more than welcome!

Thanks,
Jennifer

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

MargaretBartley — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 05:25:00 GMT

I send out a newsletter about twice a month to about a thousand readers.

I create my newsletter in Word. Word is very flexible, I can easily format the newsletter, easily add graphics and hyperlinks. The creative process of content is 95% of the work. The overhead of using Word itself is negligible, although sometimes I adjust column widths if the graphics are differently sized.

My mailing list is our Access Membership database. I've used on-line list management firms before, and it was always a chore to keep the in-house membership list current with the on-line list. This way, there is only one list.

We have three relevent fields in the database - DONOTCONTACT, for people who have requested to be not contacted, NO_EMAIL for people who have only requested that we not email them, and BAD_EMAIL for people whose email address is wrong.

The query we use as the basis of our MailMerge excludes address with any of those fields checked.

I then use the MailMerge feature of Word to send out the emails. It takes about and hour and a half to send out 1000 emails.

There are usually five to fifteen replies in each mailing. Some of them are Earthlink's spam filter, that have to be managed personally. The rest are replies from serviers. I open the Access database and check those users. I have a form that opens automatically, and makes it easy to check the appropriate box.

When someone wants to subscribe, I just add them to my Membership database.

It's very easy, and takes much less time than requesting and downloading the reports from third-party list managers.

I don't have to worry about a third-party list manager getting bought out, and having MY database as part of their assets to boost their sales price, and I know that my subscribers' information is both current and protected.

RE: What tools do you use to send out your email newsletter?

slhandph — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:08:00 GMT

I have been very pleased with www.logiforms.com for both form processing and integrated email campaign management.