Effective email distribution

In today’s world of Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, it is sometimes hard to remember what the first Killer App of the internet was email. And for most of us, it still is.

Broadcast vs. conversation
There are two main ways we use email in our parish communities: Broadcast and conversation. Today, I will deal with email that is broadcast, that is, emailed to a group of people from a central source to keep them up-to-date on news and information.

A sample solution
Historically, most people have used a manual list of names and email addresses and sent the email message out from your computer. This is good if you are looking for quick-and-easy, but it can take a good amount of time to keep this list up-to-date. As well, you can only email out from one computer: hard to manage if you are working from home, or travelling.

There is a better way. There are services that will, for free or a small cost, manage your email lists (including subscriptions, managing emails that are out-of-date, and unsubscribing). One such service is MailChimp. We have been using MailChimp at General Synod for a few years now, and have been very happy with the results.

For most parishes, the free service offered by MailChimp will be more than enough. For free, it will send out up to 12,000 emails per month. That is one email to 12,000 people, or 100 to 120. The only thing that MailChimp asks is that you follow their anti-spam policy, and that you allow a link back to MailChimp so others may sign up.

The key thing to remember is: Thou not spam. Make sure you have explicit permission from everyone you add. Mailchimp has a great beginners guide on best practices. Have a read before planning your list, even if you do not use Mailchimp.

This is just one option. There are many others. Are you using one? How are you using email? Let us know in the forum below.

About Brian Bukowski

I am web manager at the Anglican Church of Canada, and have been involved in developing web sites since falling upon Mosaic beta .9 in a University of Saskatchewan computer lab nearly 20 years ago. I am passionate about communicating online with the right tools to the right audience.

View all posts by Brian Bukowski →

This topic contains 5 replies, has 5 voices, and was last updated by cellodav 10 months, 1 week ago.

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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April 25, 2012 at 7:39 am #1588

Natasha Klukach
Member

This is a helpful post. I especially appreciate the caution against spam and against signing people up for updates without their consent and the importance of having an easy unsubscribe. I find when I’m bombarded by too frequent communication, especially of the mass email sort, I just turn off, and however well intentioned the news updates are, I’m actually less likely to pay attention. I just engaged in a several month long pleading email exchange with a Christian organization in another part of the world begging them to remove me from their email distribution list. I felt really badly engaging with them over this, but I didn’t ask to be on the email list, the subject of their emails was irrelevant for my work and their frequent mailings and large attachments were jamming up my inbox. I now have a negative impression of this organization just based on their less than thoughtful use of mass emailing. Even churches or organizations I really do want to keep up to date with can turn me off with too many updates.

April 25, 2012 at 11:29 am #1589

Heather McCance
Member

Thanks for this Brian. Although I sync my email lists over the cloud and so can do mass emails to parishioners from either my office or my home, that doesn’t help if someone else on staff wants to do something similar. I limit my mass emails to one a week (every Thursday), notifications of a parishioner’s death, or pastoral communications from the bishop, primate, etc. But when I’m away, those weekly notices just don’t go out, so it would be great if someone else could take them on in this way. Thanks again!

April 25, 2012 at 10:47 pm #1602

Brian Bukowski
Key Master

@Natasha: Good points! I see having someone sign up for an email list like a contract. As the sender we say how often we will send, and with what information. As senders of email, we break this contract at our peril. It is hard to get someone to sign up for a list, but so easy for them to stop receiving the mail, or worse, blocking our communications as spam!

@Heather: I am curious as to how you use the cloud for this. While a system like Mailchimp can be really useful, I am also interested in other ways of doing it. Do you just have a list on Dropbox, or something more elaborate?

May 16, 2012 at 9:22 pm #1992

Dawn Leger
Editor

I manage the email distribution list for youth group right now, but I’m leaving this duty to volunteers, without access to our parish server and database. This could be our solution. Thank you.

July 12, 2012 at 11:25 am #2546

cellodav
Member

I’m experimenting with a listserv feature that’s part of our web-hosting package. It’s a bit clunky, but does meet international rules about the ability of users to unsubscribe automatically. I’ll have to check out mailchimp too. Our diocese uses ConstantContact.com for their mass emails. It appears to be a free service too.
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