I currently manage communications for all the girl scout volunteers in my area. What this means is that I maintain a contact list in Outlook and when anyone has info that needs to be distributed, they send to me and I forward. I am looking for a better way to manage this and am currently looking at Mail Chimp. Here's what I need to do, does anyone use Mail Chimp or have a better suggestion that would suit my needs?

1) the ability for volunteers to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves. (I am tired of dealing with emails from people who are in my list and are no longer volunteers, or who have changed their email addresses and of trying to compare my list to the list that Council maintains of active volunteers)

2) the ability to group the volunteers by neighborhood, as some emails only apply to certain areas, and by functional roles- ie troop cookie managers get cookie emails, troop leaders get other emails

3) the ability to assign admin roles to other lead volunteers in the area so that they can send out emails to the list(s) directly without going thru me

4) The ability to schedule and send out auto updates-ie registrations for this event are due in 24 hours, monthly meeting is tomorrow night, and so on.

Any advice? I am a volunteer and do not have a budget for this, so free is good. MailChimp is free up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month, which would more than covers us. Go with that or is there something better?

Thanks!!