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MurrayM

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#2006883 3-May-2018 08:52

ronw: Simply we are a not funded group there is no money. I would pay for a reasonable service but getting up wards of 100 dollars a month would hurt me.

And you can't get these people to put in $1 each? If all the members did this then you've be covered for months (years?)

Alternative solution: set up a free blog and post there and get the members to come to you.

davidcole

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#2006906 3-May-2018 09:19

MurrayM:

ronw: Simply we are a not funded group there is no money. I would pay for a reasonable service but getting up wards of 100 dollars a month would hurt me.

And you can't get these people to put in $1 each? If all the members did this then you've be covered for months (years?)

Alternative solution: set up a free blog and post there and get the members to come to you.

I guess this is why (and I hate it) people use facebook.

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Dulouz

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#2006913 3-May-2018 09:21

I like Campaign Monitor.

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#2006998 3-May-2018 11:10

MurrayM:

ronw: Simply we are a not funded group there is no money. I would pay for a reasonable service but getting up wards of 100 dollars a month would hurt me.

And you can't get these people to put in $1 each? If all the members did this then you've be covered for months (years?)

Alternative solution: set up a free blog and post there and get the members to come to you.

I agree with looking at an alternative web-based solution (blog, forum, social media, etc) but you will still need an email service to manage administrative functions like password resets. You should really consider other options to email if there is some active intent other than disseminating information.

Email's disadvantages are often overcome by using forum software which is more effective at persuading people, organising information and managing history. There's a lot of searchable info on the web, for example, I just picked two:

https://psychcentral.com/blog/mailing-lists-versus-forums-community-convenience-closeness/

https://www.freelock.com/blog/john-locke/2010-03/mailing-list-or-forum-theory

Web-based solutions also increase your options for funding the service through ads, donations and user payments. I'm part way through setting up a couple of forums: one to replace email lists and another to prevent the use of email lists. I'm very aware of the costs to get these things going but a web-based solution provides with me with so many more funding options once the websites are up and running.

Feverbee is a great site about managing online communities. They have useful resources like a Resource list and a tool to compare community platforms.

Discourse, which is used by Feverbee, is one of the best forum software and there are a lot of discussions in their community forum about email lists versus forums.

michaelmurfy

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#2007013 3-May-2018 11:16

Another vote for Sendy - I manage the servers on a site that sends a newsletter to 510,000 people and go via Sendy hosted on one of the servers. I think all up it costs $50 to send this many emails.

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mattwnz

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#2007094 3-May-2018 13:38

ronw: Simply we are a not funded group there is no money. I would pay for a reasonable service but getting up wards of 100 dollars a month would hurt me.

I am a bit confused. Your numbers indicate you are sending to over 2000 people. So if each group member you were sending to was paying just 10 cents a month to the group , that should more than cover the cost. Also far cheaper than using standard post which is what some groups still use. Often non profit groups are run as voluntary organisation, so people that run it don't get paid at all. But you have said that it does pay you. So they should have budgets for this sort of thing, which should come out of the money you get from members (subs) or other income such as sponsorship etc, as 2000 people is quite a lot of eyeballs for a sponsor. Having an advertiser in the email also can help pay for it. But the numbers you are doing should be able to be accommodated in a few free mailchimp accounts anyway. The free plan allow you to have 2000 members and 12000 emails for free. It sounds like you have exceeded the 2000 number limit from what you have said, but setting up another mailchimp account for the extra ones would solve that.

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ronw

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#2007443 3-May-2018 20:17

As far as I can remember I did not say I was paid. No one in our group gets paid. I did say I was willing to pay a reasonable cost as my gift to the group but I do not want to get into the business of asking people for money and all the problems that would cause. I was interested in the collective wisdom of the group and did not really want suggestions of how to raise money from the group to pay for emails.

I have had some good suggestions and I will investiogate them

Thanks to those that contributed.

mattwnz:

I am a bit confused. Your numbers indicate you are sending to over 2000 people. So if each group member you were sending to was paying just 10 cents a month to the group , that should more than cover the cost. Also far cheaper than using standard post which is what some groups still use. Often non profit groups are run as voluntary organisation, so people that run it don't get paid at all. But you have said that it does pay you. So they should have budgets for this sort of thing, which should come out of the money you get from members (subs) or other income such as sponsorship etc, as 2000 people is quite a lot of eyeballs for a sponsor. Having an advertiser in the email also can help pay for it. But the numbers you are doing should be able to be accommodated in a few free mailchimp accounts anyway. The free plan allow you to have 2000 members and 12000 emails for free. It sounds like you have exceeded the 2000 number limit from what you have said, but setting up another mailchimp account for the extra ones would solve that.

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KiwiSurfer

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#2007455 3-May-2018 20:34

Another option could be to look at ways to reduce your email list. Are there people who have long since disengaged from your organization? MailChimp can monitor clicks/opens (to a point) so might be worth sending an email to those who haven't opened an email in the last e.g. 12 months to ask if they're still interested.

I know it sounds like a bad thing to do—but you'd be surprised at how many people get a new email address and just sign up again under the new address (leaving the old subscription going to a mailbox that never runs out of storage). Not many people think to update their previous subscription. Now I think about that, another suggestion I have is to trawl through your list for addresses with the same names—if you have multiple addresses for the same person might pay to check which one is still in use.

Might help you maintain a list keeping the numbers within the free tier. Would be useful whether or not you stay with MailChimp or not. Though I recommend MailChimp as I've used it previously working for a number of NPOs and its definitely worth the expense. Any other system may be 'free' but may use more of your time. How much is your personal time worth?

Stu1

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#2007500 3-May-2018 21:13

Orange box are really good they have a few charities as clients great team in Wellington and Auckland

http://www.orangebox.co.nz/clients-and-testimonials

psmi045

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#2019721 21-May-2018 12:24

I've always liked sendgrid (https://sendgrid.com/)

Definitely industrial strength, and for under 10K emails a month, they are free.

1101

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#2019769 21-May-2018 13:19

KiwiSurfer:

Another option could be to look at ways to reduce your email list.

Bulk emails need to be OPT IN . Make it opt in only & see how many actually want them or even bother to read them. That may then be
problem solved
Consent isnt the same as opt in.

It seems that its allways assumed people actually want all these emails .

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ronw

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#2019788 21-May-2018 13:46

I agree that not all emails in a list are necessarily wanted but in my case people volunteered to receive emails. I know that many people do not read the emails approx 50% do not read. In many cases I am sure some of the recipients have so much email that they lose track of what is coming in. Gmail is especially bad because it combines all emails by subject and it is easily to miss an email if there are three or four with subject name

Re Sendgrid, I had hopes for this product as its pricing seemed OK, then I found out that they charge you for storing your email list. Once that was taken into account it becomes way to expensive

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mattwnz

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#2019822 21-May-2018 14:33

ronw:

As far as I can remember I did not say I was paid. No one in our group gets paid. I did say I was willing to pay a reasonable cost as my gift to the group but I do not want to get into the business of asking people for money and all the problems that would cause. I was interested in the collective wisdom of the group and did not really want suggestions of how to raise money from the group to pay for emails.

You did mention you had to pay yourself earlier in the thread as per below.

ronw: I guess expensive is relative but as I have to pay myself and we are a non profit interest group I would find mailchimp too expensive to send say a weekly email

Also not for profit groups can pay to have staff, I belong to one myself, where someone is paid about 30k a year to do it part time, as these days many people don't have the time to do it voluntarily unless they are retired. But they do have larger membership fees as a result. I agree with some other posts above about trying to cull the list down, and then use Mailchimp. All the best bulk email services will likely be around the mailchimp price when you get to higher numbers, and those that are cheaper will likely require more of your time. So it comes down to what the higher price is. My parents use mailchimp themselves for a small non profit group, and most non profit groups are quite small. But when you are getting up to high membership numbers, I guess companies like mailchimp expect non profit groups to be then able to pay their own way a bit more.

The other thing you may want to try is asking some of these providers if they have a non profit group discount, so you aren't paying commercial rates. If it is for a good cause that they also believe in, they maybe willing to do a deal.

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