Question: How does your org. send email newsletters?
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I'm looking for a more professional way for my organization to send out emails. Currently when we send out mass emails, we send them from our individual addresses and put our members' emails in the 'BCC' (or even the 'To') field. Once I used an Outlook plugin called "send personally," which sends individual emails to everyone in the "To" field. Ideally our organization emails would like to send emails our from something like 'announcements@our domain', we would have some way of managing where the replies go, and some way of managing two overlapping groups of contacts. So I'm wondering: do your organizations use specific email newsletter tools? Are they web-based (like the ones in Idealware's rundown) or locally installed software?
Comment from Ben Sheldon on July 6, 2007 - 4:52pm
At the VISTA Project we use a Mailman newsletter list. It's the standard... which doesn't necessarily mean it's that powerful or pretty, but it has basic features like individual emails and configurable From and Reply-To. It's also nice because we can set up a form on the website where people can automatically sign up. It came with our commercial hosting service.
It is important though how you manage your mailing list. Depending on the services your nonprofit offers, it may fall under the CAN-SPAM Act. Here is a decent article on determining if the CAN-SPAM Act applies to you.
Comment from Josh King on July 9, 2007 - 12:17pm
I definitely vote for Mailman. At my organization we use it to manage hundreds of email lists, and there's nothing more powerful and featureful around (the only competitive mailing list package I've come across is Sympa, which is needlessly cumbersome and complex). Ideally, you would have an MTA like postfix setup on your mail server to run email to Mailman. I'm by no means as expert as I could be on email systems, but let me know if there's any advice I could offer. If hosting your own solution isn't an option, I don't know enough about the commercial or web-based solutions to offer an opinion.