Discussion: Club email lists

How does your club handle emailings to members? Does anybody have experience (good, bad, otherwise) using mail systems such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, etc? Any suggestions to consider or avoid?

HVO uses an opt-in YahooGroup.

Our club is small, but when I was the president I just entered all the members into my Outlook address book. Then I made a group which included all of those members. I sent the e-mails to myself and included the group as a BCC. If anyone asked to be removed from e-mails, I did so.

I belong to several other clubs/groups which have YahooGroups accounts. There is occasional spam (minimal if the list owner is on top of things). You will also get people who don't understand the difference between replying to an individual and replying to the whole group (but that's an issue with almost any listserv)

The system we have been using restricts who can send messages to the group (only authorized club officials). If anyone else attempts to send (eg reply all), the club officials see the message and have the option to delete it or forward to the list. Its a BCC system so people don't see any email address other than the sender's. I'm hoping to find something similar, as our current system will be discontinued in the next few months.

At SMOC we've been using Yahoo Groups as well, seems to work well. Probably not as slick as the mail systems you're talking about.

Mike - my running club uses a similar method within Yahoo Groups. It's set up so that only designated moderators can send messages to the whole group. Any message from anyone else first goes to the moderators for approval.

NTOA uses Yahoo Groups as well. Nuthin' fancy.

Cascade OC also uses Yahoo Groups.

On a related question, how many clubs are active on Facebook? And what features of Facebook do you find work well, or not work well?

For our integration with the Road Runner Sports Adventure Runs, we pretty much needed a Facebook presence ASAP, so we've only been on Facebook about two months.

QOC uses a Yahoo! group and Facebook for club-specific announcements, but we also use MailChimp for email marketing and other reasons, like to mail all registrants for a trail run, or all teachers signed up for a O' in schools workshop. For email marketing, we use it (MailChimp) to send a follow-up email(s) to newcomers at our events, assuming we have their email and their permission to do so - which we typically request right as they sign their liability waiver.

We have been reasonably happy with MailChimp; it has features we haven't chosen to use much yet (like integration with Facebook) but hope to eventually. The contact database is relatively primitive, though, and there is no hierarchical permissions access to it (or the templates). If you sign up for a paid plan, get the nonprofit discount.

FYI...
I read most of my YahooGroups on the web, and the sender's e-mail address is shown (very) partially with "..." appended. The few for which I get e-mail display the entire sender's address. I have no idea what the digest version does.

I think the only way to see whom the other recipeients are, is through the Members list, to which access can be restricted to just the owner/moderators.