1. What kind of newsletters/campaigns do you have?
Monthly newsletter, event announcement/reminder/thank you for attending, news and updates.

2. How often do you send emails via Wild Apricot?
We currently don’t send any emails via Wild Apricot (WA) because we still use Constant Contact (CC). Our goal is to eventually use WA, but I’m not looking forward to the eventual switchover. We send about 2-4 emails per month.

3. What is the starting point of creating a recipient list?
In CC, if we want to send to a subset, we typically have that list of emails in an Excel file. It’s easy to import those emails and add them to an Email List or to Tag them with an identifier. CC automatically looks for duplicates. We are then able to add individuals – or multiple individuals using searching and checkboxes next to records – to that Email List or Tag through CC’s interface.

In WA, if we want to send to our “whole” list, I would select the custom Members Saved Search I created for “Email List.” This includes criteria for two custom fields and one WA system field: Newsletter Preference (set to any of: “Email and Mail” or “Email Only”), Do Not Email (set to none of: “Individual Requested” or “Bad Email” or “Organization Requested”), and Email preferences (set to none of: “Email delivery disabled”). Although I just realized that I can’t use this to then send to a subset who have attended an event, as I’ve set it up as a Members Saved Search and not a Contacts Saved Search...

I would like to be able to send “Thank You for Attending” type emails to those who attended an event. Rather than email all event registrants, I would like to be able to email only those who checked in. I can’t find any way to do this in the system.

See my answer to question #5 for more on recipient lists.

4. What parts/modules of the system do you usually send emails from?
We don’t currently send any of the WA automatic emails (which were a real pain to hunt down and turn off!). Our member self-service area is not fully prepared yet. Eventually we would like to send membership renewal notices and event reminders through the system. It would be nice to actually be able to fully customize these emails – not just the text, but the HTML too, like is possible for the email blasts. Until that becomes available, we’ll likely only use WA to send our 2-4 email blasts per month from the “Emails” section of Admin.

5. What are the pros and cons of the current "add recipient" dialog?
We need a way to add “recipients” plural at one time (how about some checkboxes next to records?). And we need a way to save custom lists that have had recipients added to or removed from them. This is important to store exceptions to a Saved Search. There’s currently no way to create a custom saved list that is not based purely on search criteria. This equates to adding/removing recipients every time you’re trying to target a particular group.

Rather than just pulling from the Contact and Member Advanced Searches (although those can still be included as options), it would be nice to have “Email Lists” to keep this separate and organized. Members could be added to Email Lists on an individual basis, or by an Administrator adding all of those from a search to the Email List.

If the Administrator allows it, the members from their profile could then opt to add or remove themselves from various interest lists. For example, an animal rescue organization may send out emails about cats and separate emails about dogs – the member could choose which email lists to be on: dogs, cats, both, or neither. Allowing each individual Email List to have the option “For Administrator Use Only” would still allow for Email Lists that the Admins don’t want the members to have control over.

Right now, the only way to achieve this is to have a custom Contact Field called Mailing List that is a checkbox field, but even this isn’t a great solution, as the items can’t be shown/hidden on an individual basis. And then, in order to actually email those folks, a custom Saved Search has to be made for each selection on that checkbox list…not very user-friendly. Plus, the settings for the member to change their preferences would be under the member’s main profile tab, instead of the “Email subscriptions” tab…again, not user-friendly.

Other
Please allow better customization of the “Email subscriptions” tab of the member profile. Our organization doesn’t use forums and I don’t want members to be able to opt in/out of event reminders, just emails in general. I also wanted to change the text of the “email blasts” line (our members may not know what this means). I’ve accomplished these changes with CSS, but that’s not an ideal solution; if anything changes this gadget in an update, I’ll have to revisit and ensure everything is still hidden and altered appropriately.

Thank you for your time and consideration on these matters!

1. Monthly newsletter, weekly event email, volunteering campaigns, donations solicitations.
2. see above.
3. I use the all contacts, or all members options mostly. I also create specialized searches in the contact advanced search screen and use the in some emails.
4. Usually from the email system.
5. The main pro is that you can see saved searches, the main con is that when you compose an email, you cannot select "all contact" or "all members" unless you save the draft, exit out, then go back in to send it - then you can see those two options in the recipient dialog. That's weird to me.

We are "Husky" development team at Wild Apricot named, responsible for emailing area of the product.

We've already made big improvements to our emailing workflow which will be our next release. But to move further we need your help.

If you’re willing to help us, please follow the link below and answer a few questions.

https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/15423798

We're looking forward to reading your feedback.

Lily, Husky Team at Wild Apricot
Emailing development crew.

We are "Husky" development team at Wild Apricot named, responsible for emailing area of the product.

We've already made big improvements to our emailing workflow which will be our next release. But to move further we need your help.

If you’re willing to help us, please follow the link below and answer a few questions.

https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/15423798

We're looking forward to reading your feedback.

Lily, Husky Team at Wild Apricot
Emailing development crew.

1. At this point because of the limited email recipient selection function I do not send out many emails
2. In the last 3 months I have sent 3 emails
3. My members are are already divided using their group affiliation. The groups correspond to diferent chapters. When doing emails I need to email based of of the "group participation"
4. I usually send emails from the email templates
5. con i have to go through each member. need to be able to not just email all contacts or have to pick the contacts. need to be able to select a group to mail. Need to be able to send out event notifications/promotion but wish to exclude the members that are already enrolled.

Quite often I have the need to generate a mail list based on a search, but them remove / add a few members manually before I send. At the moment I can't do this.

So, I might have 170 members who are not lapsed, but before I email them I want to add a few or remove a few.

Hope this is clear.

Chris Ogden

Thanks for the input, I out this into our analysis queue.

In our case, when sending an event invitation, we would like to be able to send it to only certain membership levels or other member groups. This would seem easiest if it mirrored the ability you provide for sending email blasts to saved searches. The choices within the events email drop down list is quite limited.

Is this specific for event or broadly for emails? We have a separate thread for the latter but the former did not come up before I think.

See http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308920-archive/suggestions/8833339-manually-selecting-recipients-for-email-blasts-28

In order to send an email to a “Group” already established in “Group Management”, Wild Apricot first requires that we create a “search” of that group, then we can send the email to that “search”.

My request is for Wild Apricot to add to the email recipient selection options “Group” with a drop down of the established groups to select from.

All standard email systems easily allow sending an email to an established group. If I want to send an email to my Board of Directors or to a specific donor group that is already established, it doesn’t make sense that we should we be required to do this extra function in order to send an email to the group.

Following a query to Dimitri, he suggested I start a post on this, as although some upgrades to the email system are due in the next release, he says the following will not be catered for, and therefore I need to garner support!

Whilst the Seach facility is very useful, in my experience it often includes people you do not want to include in the ensuing Email blast. In my case it was chasing outstanding money, where the Contacts / outstanding balance search beautifully brought up the list, but some members I had already contacted, and they had promised me settlement and / or said they had paid and the cheque was 'in the post!'. In this situation I wanted to be able to not include them in the email, especially as I wanted to word it fairly abruptly - i.e. Pay up or your are Out!!

Apparently in the new release we will be able to 'Add' people to a current search list, good, but not Save the list, nor will we be able to generate a list of email names from scratch and save it, which would also for me, be hugely useful!

Be most interested to know if anyone else would support this, Dmitri says there is no existing post, which I find very suprising, but there again he is 'Chief' - so he should know!!

It would be very useful to be able to add/delete contacts from the recipient list when emailing event attendees.

For example, we would like to be able to select just the "no shows" from an event and email them, or alternatively remove the "no shows" from an email list so we could send the actual attendees a special offer.

Regards,
Ian
worthing and adur chamber of commerce