Electronic Bulk Messaging

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ICT Guide for Decision Makers

Technology Applications Mobile Applications for NGOs Electronic Bulk Messaging Constituent Relationship Management Systems Document Management Systems Project Management Applications

Index

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Email Address List 3 Content 4 Technology 4.1 Desktop Mailing 4.2 Service Providers 4.3 Self-hosted Programs 5 Legal/ethical concerns

Introduction

One of the bliss and the curse that the internet brought to our lives is the e-mailing. We get our message anywhere in the world within seconds where it used to take days or weeks before – and with a fraction of the cost. However our inboxes fill with tons of junk mail every day and some of them aren’t even that innocent. Not only we can send our messages fast and cheap, we can send it to lots of people at the same time with little more effort.

Although there is the facet of misuse, abuse, even sometimes criminal intent, mass mailing can be a powerful tool in the good hands of a non-profit organisation. Periodical e-mails to millions of people played an important role in sending the masses to ballot boxes and vote for Obama during the last election in the USA, for example. If used wisely, a newsletter can keep you in contact with your beneficiaries, or donors. Or a well-kept mailing list can prove useful when it comes to sending an emergency message asking for help.

In this article we will look into methods and strategies of sending electronic mails, and in particular electronic newsletters, to lots of people, so you know your options, and what you need, and you do it the right way. We are not talking about sending unsolicited marketing mails to huge masses, but to a select group of people with whom you have been in contact as beneficiaries, donors or stakeholders, or at least you know are interested in your cause.

Email Address List

First and foremost, you will need an email address list – of people whom you target as recipients of this mailing. Of course having just more than the e-mail address can be more valuable: First name and last name for example can help us personalize our mailing. More information, such as organisation name, city, country and such can help us target our mailing if necessary. You can keep this information in your email program’s contact list, or on a spreadsheet like Excel, or in a more sophisticated database. But if you are going to send from your mailing program or going to use a third party, generally an Excel spreadsheet is good enough. Here is an example:

Content

The second element is the message or the content of our message. This can be a short plain text message or a longer, nicely built document. However there are several issues you have to consider before you go fancy here:

• Size/Bandwidth: Big messages or too fancy ones with complex layouts, fonts, graphics, and photos are heavy in terms of internet bandwidth. It downloads slowly, it costs you and the recipient more, and creates lots of internet traffic if sent to masses which in turn slows internet down for all of us. So:
  • Keep it simple. Sometimes for clarity or branding you may do some layout and such but keep your creativity under leash.
  • You don’t have to send everything on email. You may just send a few introductory notes and invite the interested people to read or download the rest from your website or from a free online document repository.
  • Personal plea: Please do not use productivity program output (such as Word, Excel or PDF) as newsletter. They are bloated big files with lots of unnecessary layout, editing and even printing information hidden. If you need a layout have someone with web skills create you a simple template (more of it below) without the extra stuffing.
  • Unless very necessary, avoid photos (of course if it has news value… use) or big graphics. If you need to use a photo, use small version (thumbnail – less than 150 by 150 pixels) and people can see the big picture from your site if they want. If you need to use graphics, make sure they are “optimized” for internet (i.e. less colors, compressed…) most graphics programs today have such functions.

• Compatibility: There are many email programs, some of them read from the web, some of them have their own applications, and even some people access their mails via their mobile devices… So your carefully crafted masterpiece newsletter may not look the same on many mail programs. Of course if your message is plain text, you don’t have such a problem, no matter what. . Yet another reason why to keep it simple…
  • Do not depend on fonts. Same fonts may not be available on different platforms. If you do layout, keep it simple HTML.
  • Graphics files should be internet standards that can be read without add on modules: JPG, GIF, PNG.
  • Again do not use program output as email (Word, Excel, PDF, or such) just plain text or plain HTML. Here is a good guide on How to Code HTML Email Newsletters that you may want to hand out to your technical person.

If you can, test your template with various email clients: I tested our newsletter with, Outlook, MSN, Google, Yahoo, Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows Phone, and IPhone. This gives me a wide coverage for our recipients.

Find the right content mix for your audience. Don’t forget your newsletter or mailing is competing with lots of others that sit in your recipient’s inbox. And in many cases you only have less than ten seconds before the person decide to either click the delete button or read the rest of the mail. So the content should be brief, of interest to the audience, and to the point (even with the teaser). If you have a periodical newsletter, use a template and keep layout consistent, so your regular recipients know where to look for their interests. Again if you have lots to tell, you don’t need to send it all in the newsletter, just an introduction to invite the interested people to your site to read the rest.

Here are some useful links on newsletter content to help you get started:

• Quick Tips for Better nonprofit Newsletters.
• Email newsletter as a marketing tool for nonprofits.
• Getting started with email newsletters (Email 101)

Technology

Now you have the address list and the content, all you need to decide on what technology options to use to send your message to the masses. Fortunately you have lots of options, depending on your needs.

One of the decision factors is the number of the recipients on your list.

Desktop Mailing

If the number is less than 25 or so, you may use your email program. Be sure to cut and paste all the recipient addresses into the BCC field (blind carbon copy), so that each recipient doesn’t get all the other’s email addresses.

If it is less than a couple of hundred people, you may use your mail program with “mail merge” capability, such as Outlook. Mail merge is a function of some mail programs, which allows merging a template document written in a word processor (for example Word) and recipient data. That way each mail is sent individually and personalized with each recipient’s information, such as Dear (firstname) (lastname). This can be very slow as it sends all one by one from your computer. Use this with caution with only small number of people as it has the potential of raising the eyebrows of your internet service provider.

For a guide on how to do mail merge with Microsoft Office check [this link].

Now, if your recipients are your discussion group, for example “Field Surveyors of South Africa” or something like that, then you may form a Google Group, or Yahoo Group and ask them to join the group. Then you can send them plain text newsletters to the recipients. That’s a free and easy to do option.

If you have hundreds or thousands of recipients for your newsletter then you have to look at this more seriously. Managing a list like that with new subscriptions or cancellations or email changes, statistics is not an easy task – let alone sending them the mail regularly. You have to either use an online service or host similar services on your servers. The decision depends on your organisation’s capacity and capabilities.

First let’s talk about these bulk mailing platforms. Similar to mail merge, these server applications work with a template (simple text or HTML) and a database of recipients. The database can be a simple mail list or a sophisticated contact database or CRM where you can store other information about your recipients. These programs are designed to do the mailing job efficiently and within given parameters (such as scheduled sending, throttling the sending speed). Beyond this basic function they provide statistics about sent, bounced, read emails. They keep record of email bounces so you can keep your database up-to-date. They also provide means for the recipients to subscribe or unsubscribe from your newsletters/list (which is a legal must in some countries). In summary they have:

• A template creation/storing mechanism
• Message creation/storing mechanism
• Database to store or manage mailing list
• Emailing capability
• Manage subscribe/unsubscribe requests
• Provide statistical reports, bounced mail reports and such
• Most have an online web interface to handle the requests
• Most have email based request processing (subscribe/unsubscribe)
• Most have capability to work with plain text and formatted text (HTML) messages.

Service Providers

Going with a service provider could be the best solution for the most of us. Good function and less hassle, if you can find a good service provider. Most of them require a monthly payment with various plans according to the size of your mailing list. If you decide to go with an online mailing service provider, you have to consider these:

• Do they have a discounted plan for a non-profit organisation? Most of them do have. Ask.
• Do they have a pricing schedule for different number of recipients? Choose a plan for the number of your recipients. If you are successful and list grows, lucky you, you can always upgrade.
• What is the service set up fee? If you insist, you may get it for free or at a discounted price since you are a nonprofit.
• Who is their clientele? Do they serve commercial spammers a lot? If this is the case probably the mails they sent end up in junk mail or rejected by some mail servers. You can test this by setting up a free email account (gmail for example) and subscribing to some of the newsletters they offer. If they end up in your junk mail or never served then question it.
• What kind of services do they provide? Subscription, unsubscription, delivery tracking, statistics, forwarding…
• Try to start with a probationary contract at first (or free trial) so don’t commit for a whole year before testing.

Of all the numerous bulk email service providers in Africa, the only one I found that offers special pricing and plans for non-profit organisations in South Africa is Graphic Mail. It is an international service provider, which works with 16 countries around the world. If you know of any other reputable company that has a special pricing/plan package for non-profits in Africa, please let me know. Also if you have the means to pay them internationally, there are many other international companies providing special offers for non-profits.

Self-hosted Programs

If you are brave enough you may handle it yourself. But before you go on for the freedom, consider:

• These things require management (yes some of them easier to manage, but still…) Do you have the capacity?
• Does your hosting provider (if you have one) support it, do they have a limit on how many emails can your server send?: per hour or per day… (Our hosting provider had 50 mails limit per hour, but raised it for our cause to 500 – so ask and you may receive).

Here are some options (free ones):

• Mailman GNU
• Dada Mail
• phpList: This is the software we use it for our newsletter Vuvuzela management. We chose it for ease of use, management and expandability (and our Hosting Provider supported it.)
• Majordomo
• Smartlist - an interesting feature is the ability to process subscription or unsubscription requests in natural English language (even misspelled ones).
• Sympa - can handle very large lists – I mean very large.
• LISTSERV - commercial with a limited freeware option: up to 500 subscribers. I had to mention it since it is the original one.

If you insist on running the mailing from your desktop (Windows) and a non-profit working on health SendBlaster may donate their software.

Legal/ethical concerns

As mentioned before unsolicited commercial emails are a big problem chipping away our bandwidth and time. Many countries adopted some regulations to tackle this. In South Africa this is regulated by "Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002". With or without regulations as a legitimate electronic newsletter publisher you have to abide with some legal and ethical guidelines as a courtesy to your recipients and fellow internet users. Here are some notes:

• Always clearly show what your organisation is within the mailing
• Provide an opt-out, cancel method (unsubscribe) method within the mailing.
• When you receive cancellation, unsubscribe message in any way, do what it says.
• Don’t share/sell your mailing list to any other party without the consent of the recipients.
• Keep your mailing list secure, and provide access by the staff only if necessary.

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