emails

i am looking for an efficient way to send emails. i currently use yahoo email via microsoft outlook. in order to email i want to be able to send an email to either all of the emails or a group. right now i have more than 200 email addresses and growing.

any suggestions? you can email me directly at hncvisalia@yahoo.com

Lester

If your email list is getting into the hundreds then you should consider using a bulk email and list management application of some kind.

My preference is for MailChimp, which is relatively inexpenisve and has not for profit discounts. It's a great online application and I've used it to run several nonprofit email campaigns. I've written about using it here - www.kingjason.co.uk/index.php/mailchimp-email-newsletters/.

There are lots of alternatives - see this article on the LASA Knowledgebase website - www.ictknowledgebase.org.uk/bulkemailsoftware.

Thank you for your input jason.  Our org is looking to do email newletters asking for donations and this so far looks to be the most attractive option to us.  E-Tapestry wanted a small fortune for the same type of service. 

Our marketing team uses Constant Contact. I haven't heard them mention any problems, and there's a 20-30% discount for nonprofits.

I had the same questions and found this very useful article at Idealware -- " A Few Good Broadcast Email Tools" at http://www.idealware.org/articles/fgt_email_newsletter_tools.php.  I went with Vertical Response which allows nonprofits to send free 10,000 email messages each month.  The editor is easy to use to set up a nice looking newsletter; you can also edit it in html code if you are so inclined  The statistics were easy to interpret and the lists easy to manage.

I also have used their survey service which also has a discount for nonprofits.  We found the statistics useful for this too.

Carolyn

For several years I used a product called Group Mail developed by a company in Ireland. It is a client-based product that works with your regular mail server to send out e-mail to large groups. The product worked fairly well for a while, but as Spam filtering and blocking became more prominent, the ability to get my messages to my members became harder and harder. Eventually I was spending an additional $40 per month with my hosting service to have a static IP address which I was assured would do the trick. It did for a while but eventually about 30% of my group e-mails were still being blocked.

More lately, I have been using a server-based product that runs through my web hosting service. This FOSS product is called PHPList and has just about all of the features that GroupMail had, including the ability to import mail from Excel. The last few times I used this, it appeared to be getting better results, but I suspect I am not getting complete bounce-back information.

Using a third party service - like Constant Contact - is another option. My experience has been that you get what you pay for and the more you are willing to spend, the better your results. There are a number of service providers of this type and there are a lot of tiered plans to choose from. Others in this group may be better able to advise you on the merits of these various services.

John Brandt
Technology Consultant
www.jebswebs.com

John,

jebswebs:

More lately, I have been using a server-based product that runs through my web hosting service. This FOSS product is called PHPList

My experience with PHPList, was that you had to be fairly technically capable to understand how to get things to look right. It may have become more user friendly since I used it a few years ago, but if not, this is not a 'beginners' product.

jebswebs:

My experience has been that you get what you pay for and the more you are willing to spend, the better your results.

If you are comparing the paid service of Constant Contact to PHPList, I agree. However, if you are comparing the wide range of hosted email services, I disagree. The cost of these services runs the gamut, from quite inexpensive, like Constant Contact, to very very expensive. On the high end, my sense is that more isn't better in this case.

Also, another resource for nonprofits is Vertical Response which has a free service for nonprofits.

Best wishes,

Sasha