For DrupalCamp CO 2011 we ran into a bit of a problem with how to send out an email to the local community about the camp. We had posted on groups.drupal.org in the relevant groups (there are about 6 groups in or near Colorado), tweeted, and talked about it in IRC, but we wanted to email people, people who may have not heard about the Camp on the existing mediums. We have email addresses from those who registered for the camp last year, and groups provides a group broadcast to its members, but if we used each of these methods separately we would be sure to send duplicates to some people. Duplicates make people mad. We don't want to make anyone mad! :)
Has anyone else run into this problem and if so how did you deal with it?
In our case, we collected all the email addresses from the various groups and the site last year, listed them, and removed duplicates. greggles could say exactly, but I believe he used the groups broadcast for many people, and then the rest (about 400) was split between a couple people to email from our individual gmail accounts. Obviously that isn't the best method, but it worked.
Given the desire to email addresses collected via different means I'm not sure a new solution for collecting emails is the best option for next time. A email list form on the drupalcamp website might collect a lot of people, but we may still want to email those people in gdo groups who didn't sign up for the email list.
Any insights or thoughts?
Comments
For DrupalCamp Dallas 09, 10
For DrupalCamp Dallas 09, 10 (and upcoming 2011) we just put all the emails we collected (legally!) from various sources into MailChimp and did all our email communication with it. It has several methods of mass upload and it removes duplicates. It's free up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month. You can create nice-looking emails with it, it handles bounces. unsubscribes, and analytics. After the camp we used it for occasional notices of upcoming meetings and events. Has worked well.
I think that this would be an
I think that this would be an area where the Drupal Association could help local groups. The Association currently maintains a database of all of the d.o users, along with their declared email preferences. Currently this is help in CiviCRM, which is also used as a mailing program.
The major impediment to offering this as a service at the moment is resource availability. The Association has a duty to users to not release their email addresses and to make sure that those addresses are only used in the manner allowed. This means that any mail sent through Civi needs to be approved and set up by Association staff or a manager.
I will pass this along to the Association Exec Director for consideration.
I stand corrected on this.
I stand corrected on this. The Associations Civi setup is no longer used as a mailer. For DrupalCon Chicago, we used Constant Contact.
We are currently in the process of migrating the Civi data into Salesforce, and integrating that with the MailChimp mailing service.
I think that it would be great to extend this service to camps, but the Association will likely have to finish some of its ongoing initiatives before it can take it on. At least the conversation has started.