I agree with previous comments. We have made email blasts available to select members by giving them newsletter admin credentials. The privilege comes with a user manual that tells them what they can and cannot touch (such as creating new email templates). This means those members can create and send emails to a pre-established Member Saved search. They can check on receipt stats and save the sent email to their personal email log. Not perfect, but improves communication to subsets of our membership.

Agreed that it would be useful - but absolutely MUST by default be turned off. Also when enabled - this must be in such a way that it is restricted to being used only from a specific page in the 'Public (signed on members view of the site)'

Here it should be an option within a specific member search.

This would mean that you would be able to control which members are able to do mail blasts and to whom they can do mail blasts.

I can say from previous experience prior to using Wild Apricot, when we handled our emails by just adding in a list of recipients in an Outlook (or whatever) email that we had way too many inappropriate emails going to our complete membership as some recipients collected these email addresses (when an approved sender sent as To: or CC: instead of BCC:)

Yes - only allowing your Admins to send email blasts can be a pain - but it does manage far better the quality and volumes of emails going to members. And believe me - 'Too many' emails to members from the organization is a very common complaint.

If/when such email blast capability is added to a directory search results, it also needs to be a much simpler workflow that the current email blast process - otherwise we will have way too many disasters.

I also think that the forums should be enhanced to operate in a listserv mode.

Bulk emails and Listserv/forum are really 2 totally different things

Agreed that it would be useful - but absolutely MUST by default be turned off. Also when enabled - this must be in such a way that it is restricted to being used only from a specific page in the 'Public (signed on members view of the site)'

Here it should be an option within a specific member search.

This would mean that you would be able to control which members are able to do mail blasts and to whom they can do mail blasts.

I can say from previous experience prior to using Wild Apricot, when we handled our emails by just adding in a list of recipients in an Outlook (or whatever) email that we had way too many inappropriate emails going to our complete membership as some recipients collected these email addresses (when an approved sender sent as To: or CC: instead of BCC:)

Yes - only allowing your Admins to send email blasts can be a pain - but it does manage far better the quality and volumes of emails going to members. And believe me - 'Too many' emails to members from the organization is a very common complaint.

If/when such email blast capability is added to a directory search results, it also needs to be a much simpler workflow that the current email blast process - otherwise we will have way too many disasters.

I also think that the forums should be enhanced to operate in a listserv mode.

Bulk emails and Listserv/forum are really 2 totally different things

This is crucial for us. We will be leaving Wild Apricot if this is not implemented soon. We are forced to use Yahoo Groups as well as Wild Apricot to have this facility, and we cannot continue to maintain two membership lists as well as confusing our members.

Allowing members to email blast other members would be very useful to a few of my associations. It seems it could replace listserve. I do agree that it should be a feature members or admin could opt out of.

Is it something similar to the listserv functionality?

It should only be added if there is the option of switching it on/off. We will never want to use such a facility.

Absolutely NOT, unless this feature is disabled by default and requires admin activation. We would not use this feature in our organization. Emails are strictly for notification of events to our members. It is not social media. However, we would like a text messaging forum for our members.