This feature would be extremely useful for scheduled meetings and events that are intended for specific groups (e.g., Board members, Committee members, folks who indicated they were interested in service projects, etc).

As a workaround, you can always create an email as a draft or template and use it later.

I would really to have the ability to create scheduled emails. We made the decision to not use an email marketing tool because Wild Apricot holds our entire contact list. However, now we have lost the ability to create newsletters and other emails in advance and schedule re-occurring emails..

This is a much needed feature. We have newsletters that we want to send every monday at 10am. It would be great to be able to build these over the weekend and have them automatically send at the scheduled time....

Hi,

Having separate announcements for each individual event would deluge our contacts with emails. As a new feature we would find it advantageous to be able to consolidate several upcoming events into a single periodic email.

The following sets of parameters would, I think, accommodate the vast majority of needs.

Set 1) Periodicity; How often to send consolidated event announcements. Two parameters x = how often (an integer) , and y= units where y can be Weeks, Months, day of Month, day of week, etc. . Perhaps a start date and an end date on when to initiate and end the emails blasts.

Set 2) Number of events to announce in the consolidated email; This could be an absolute number i.e. the next 5 events, or be a function of time. (all events over the next 4 weeks) .

Let me know if I can be of further help.

Thanks, Mike

We were using Constant Contact but are now using the Wild Apricot newsletter feature so we (I!) no longer need to maintain a separate contact list. I put my vote in for the ability to schedule our weekly newsletters ahead of the sending day/time. Other than this one thing, I've found the Wild Apricot system good to work with.

Sonia
Elder Services Resource Network

We would definitely use something like this.

We have a weekly event that changes each week. We'd like to queue up emails that take everyone who subscribed to the corresponding email list and send them information about that week's event. This way, our volunteer will only need to login once and set up months of event emails, instead of trying to remember to log in weekly.

Hi David, we considered this but decided against it - we will keep expanding our email service instead. To properly integrate with an external email service would take tons of work to provide great user experience and the integration would still be limited.

Hi Dmitry,

Further to my email on this subject, I thought I'd post to the forum thread to refresh the topic and see if it elicits any further interest from the user community.

Also, I've seen a number of references to Constant Contact and wonder whether it might be relatively straightforward to "bolt on" one of the mail management services like Constant Contact or MailChimp to provide this kind of functionality.

I would like this feature, too. We send out a weekly newsletter to members.

I compile the email on Friday, but would like it to be sent late on Sunday night (so members can read it first thing Monday morning when they check their email).

So, instead of clicking "Send now", I would like to be able to "Send later" and enter a date and time for the email delivery to begin.

I would also love to see this feature. We do a weekly email update to members that we like to go out early Thursday mornings. Would be tremendously useful to schedule that ahead of time.

For others on this thread, if you use Constant Contact, I would recommend looking into Vertical Response, if you are a 501(c)3 non-profit they give you 10,000 free emails per month.

That being said, you still need to maintain a separate contact list, separate login to remember, etc. Would be so great to have this incorporated into Wild Apricot!

My organization needs a way to schedule what time an event invite or reminder is sent. The new way of sending it around the same time that an event starts doesn't work for us as most of our events begin after work hours, but we'd like our e-mails to be sent during work hours. This is a problem for us!

Karin Barden
USGBC - Illinois Chapter

I am begging that the ability to schedule e-blasts be added to the Wild Apricot road map asap. And if anyone does know a workaround, please post it here.

Jack Massa
Greater Atlanta ASTD

We also use Constant contact for the Newsletter, which requires maintaining a separate contact list and workflow. Does anyone have an interim solution/option for publishing monthly newsletters within Wild Apricot?

Thank you.

EveMarie

Anne Arundel Women Giving Together

[quote user="Meagan"][quote user="iant"]

We currently use Constant Contact for our email newsletters etc. but would hope to be able to abandon that when the WA email blast mechanism/editor has improved.

Being able to schedule emails would be a necessity for us.

Regards,
Ian
worthing and adur chamber of commerce

[/quote]

We currently use Constant Contact as well and would like to move over to WAP but have not been able to. This feature would help us to consolidate these tasks to one program which was the main idea for signing up with WildApricot.

Ditto!

[/quote]

[quote user="iant"]

We currently use Constant Contact for our email newsletters etc. but would hope to be able to abandon that when the WA email blast mechanism/editor has improved.

Being able to schedule emails would be a necessity for us.

Regards,
Ian
worthing and adur chamber of commerce

[/quote]

Ditto!

I would like to add my vote to this topic as well, along with an example.

My organization is one chapter of a number in the state, that combine for a state conference every year. We would like to do advertising of this in the months before the conference. I would like to be able to create an email with the following options.

1. Create the email in advance and then set a date when the emailing process is initiated. I know it takes some time for all the emails to be sent, but a particular date to initiate would be great.

2. Schedule the email for repeat delivery, for example, every Monday, or every 2 weeks on a Monday. Look at Google Calendar or any smartphone for how to schedule repeating alarms or events on a calendar, like a birthday every year on a certain date.

3. Set a duration for the email, ie, how many times it will be sent out, or until what date.

Example: Send an email starting on February 2, 2011. Interval: 2 weeks Day: Wednesday

End date: March 9, 2011

This should generate an email sent on Feb. 2, Feb. 16, and March 2

This would also be an easy way of customizing announcements for events. I am going to be using an email blast instead of an event announcement because the email blast may go out to all contacts, where the event announcement will only go to members, or past event attendees. I have contacts who are lapsed members who I want to encourage to go to an event, and renew their membership, but I cannot easily send the event announcement to them.

I really hope that this functionality can be moved up on the wish-list and be in line for implementation. It is something so basic to other scheduling applications that to see it missing from Wild Apricot, which has so many great features, is surprising.

Thanks for all the work you guys are doing. It is very much appreciated, and has made managing my organization far easier.

Russell

@ ElanaB - sorry, there is nothing of sorts on our short-term roadmap, this is still on the wishlist for now.

This would also be really helpful for our organization to have. For example, we like to send out emails the morning after an event thanking the participants for attending. I can compose the emails in advance and it would save a lot of time if we could schedule them to go out instead of having to sign in to send them out. Please let me know if there's currently any way to do this, or if there will be any functionality like this in the next release. Thanks.

The Capital Network

I would love the ability to schedule emails for future dates. I'd like to start sending emails out on Fridays, and this way I can draft them in advance, and have it ready to go but don't have to be in the office (or near a computer) to send it out. As a tiny non profit, (aka I'm the only one doing this) it would be VERY helpful.