Getting our email game on (and weekly newsletter)

General
#1

Working on two things in the next couple weeks.

  1. Getting a better email client set up.
  2. Setting up a weekly newsletter

Better email client
Right now our adresses (treasurer, secretary, etc.) are receive only. Which makes it really awkward to reach out to people, since it’s always sent from a personal email, but CC an official.

Given that not everyone is quite tech-savvy enough to add/remove aliases from our current email infrastructure, I think we should opt for a hosted solution. That way it should be relatively easy for groups to create additional email addresses in the future if they want to reach out / advertise / apply to grants.

So I just emailed ProtonMail to see what business access they can give away for non-profits. Will keep you posted on what we can get for free. But either way, I think we should get this set up.


Setting up a weekly newsletter
Communication has been trickling off the past few months. As have donations.
Which makes sense. Hard to stay closed for six months and still maintain a ton of community involvement.

So I propose a nice weekly update to help people keep track of what’s going on at NB. Primarily consisting of the following:

  1. General update / call to volunteer. Open / closed status.
  2. One minute walkthrough video. Once a week someone needs to walk through 272 Capp St and upload the video to youtube.
  3. Upcoming events. Tuesday meeting.
  4. Brief financial update
  5. Donation link / shopify tshirt link
  6. [Additional info on discuss]

Getting this running
Starting off, I imagine this to be a fairly manual process.
I’ll probably just use a email marketing tool (free trials yo) to get things started. Then getting mailgun or something like that running for a basic batch email server.

Eventually I’d like to come up with a content management page where people can suggest things for the weekly emails (i.e. add pictures, events, etc) but for now I think I’ll just solicit those on discuss.

HELP NEEDED: The main thing I need to get started is the email addresses themselves.
Sources I can think of:

  • old mailing list
  • discuss emails (this forum)
  • maybe emails from slack?
  • patreon

So any help on compiling these emails would be awesome.

#2

Dig it and look forward to seeing this get going. I also like the idear of starting with a Halloween edition. And then perhaps following with a Wed or Thurs blast following the meeting with a summary in the newsletter.

Think this could be a good revival for our old e-mail list “discuss” and will start poking at that a bit as well.

I would also invite others to contribute general topics and specific items (current hacks) for inclusion.

Hackaday has been doing a weekly links write up as well as a podcast that could be good for some inspiration s well.