Sending email blasts to members

[parks]

Hello, we’re looking for a simple solution that will allow us to send email blasts to all our active members. We are looking at the Email Broadcast addon, in addition to integrating with MailChimp or AWeber.

We have the following requirements:
1 – Send emails to all active members and/or individual members
2 – Ability to attach files to emails
3 – Systematic support for removing expired members email addresses when a membership expires
4 – Systematic support for when a member changes their email address (new address is sent to the mail app and old one is removed)

The Email Broadcast addon does not appear to support including attachments in the emails. The AWeber intergration doesn’t seem to systematically support a member changing their email address and/or removing expired memberships. I haven’t found anything about the MailChimp integration with regards to how/what is systematically synchronized.

Is there anything you can recommend that would meet our needs? The last resort would be to simply generate an email list from emember and copy it into an email sent outside the system.

Thanks,
Terri

[wzp]

It’s the attachment requirement that disqualifies not only the addon, but also MailChimp and Constant Contact, as well. The easiest approach export a list of active members, and do some sort of mail-merge; outside of the plugin. Alternatively, you might want to look at a newsletter plugin like MailPoet, for which we have an integration addon for.

[parks]

Thank you. Turns out MailPoet also does not allow attachments. It’s looking more like a non-integrated solution is needed. We’ll keep looking.

Thanks again.

[wzp]

Out of curiosity, what kind of attachments are you trying to send anyway?

[parks]

Just PDF files (meeting agendas, speaker handouts, etc.), most of which are small, but we have a monthly newsletter that is about 2MB in size. We are a non-profit genealogy society in Southern California with less than 250 members.

[wzp]

One possible solution is to store the agendas, handouts, and other PDF files in a publicly accessible Google Drive; and then have download links to them in your newsletter. That way, you can always edit the files, if you need to, after the newsletter has gone out.

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