Mail Chimp or simliar services
 

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!!

A thought: Aside from your #2 requirement I think most everything could be accomplished via Yahoo Groups or possibly Google Groups.

Does the national organization already use a cloud email provider? Perhaps they have some features they could extend to you.

I adore MadMimi and use it to manage a ~300 member mailing list that has weekly e-news for a group.

The interface is crude and no WSYWIG.

But the support is phenomenal. I have never waited -- this is not an exaggeration -- for more than 3 minutes to get a response via email to a support question.

I am the Grand Knight for a Knights of Columbus Council and we use Mailchimp alot.

It works great. I believe you can do everything you listed.

Welcome to FlyerTalk, BroncoJeff! Thanks for posting, and keep it up.

+1. Phenomenal support, friendly as heck, and I found the interface more than manageable?

I really like Madmimi.

I think for your needs, MailChimp is a good choice, especially with their generous free plan.

From looking up MailChimp's features, I saw this under "Geolocation."

More good stuff under "Segmentation and Groups." I'm not sure how specific and granular you want to get with your segmenting, but looks like it can do the job. I briefly used MailChimp by setting it up for a nonprofit I worked with. Great-looking dashboard, a joy to look at.

Another alternative is Aweber. That's what I use for my frequent flyer e-mail newsletter. Aweber doesn't have as beautiful a user interface as MailChimp, but the deliverability is top-notch.

The one problem might be getting everyone to sign up again to the newsletter with MailChimp. Most reputable e-mail marketing companies won't just let you just upload a bunch of e-mail addresses to their system. They need to ensure that people really want e-mails from you by requiring a "double opt-in."

That means a user has to enter their e-mail into a sign-up box on a website. The e-mail service provider (ESP) will then automatically send a confirmation e-mail message to the user, with a link. The user has to click on the link to confirm the subscription. Only then is will a user be actually signed up for the newsletter.

I've subscribed to other bloggers who used MailChimp. In one case, the confirmation message from MailChimp went into my spam folder (I use Gmail). In another case, one blogger's autoresponder e-mails (pre-written messages sent automatically) stopped being sent. The blogger had to contact support to turn his e-mails back on.

Those are probably isolated cases, but it spooked me and I went with Aweber. My messages nearly always get through to the inbox. Aweber collaborates closely with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and is hyper-vigilant about protecting its sender reputation, which helps ensure deliverability.

Kudos to the other poster who mentioned MadMimi, which I hadn't heard of before. I'll check that out.

Hope this helps.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Aweber other than being a satisfied customer.

As a the only certified "MailChimp Expert" here in Singapore. Feel free to ask me any questions you have regarding MC.

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I will thanks. We have our admin committee meeting on Thursday and I am going to propose, if approved (it will be, because no one else wants this "job") I will implement!

I'm sure you're already aware of this, but I've seen others misunderstand this before, so...

I presume you realize that's total emails OUT, not emails in? eg, if you did actually have 2000 subscribers then you can only send 6 email/month to them (6x2000 is your 12,000).

Of course, presuming you list is much smaller, the number of emails can go up significantly.