In support of sending/tracking mass email communications to other hackspaces (e.g. initial approach/survey comms), it would be useful to leverage a free email campaign mgmt tool. Options suggested so far:
Please post other suggestions here and then we can vote
Do you have any examples of what these ultimately look like ?
What benefit do we get from using a tool like this as opposed to sending out an e-mail from a mail server?
I’m going to make myself unpopular and suggest CiviCRM - https://civicrm.org/
Benefits include the fact that it’s a complete CRM meaning that we can chuck all of the contact data into it and potentially use it for management of membership, renewals, pledges and a host of other stuff.
Ian.
Could you explain why this is unpopular please?
It’s a PHP based solution which to a lot of people gives it an immediate negative connotations.
It’s not the best management experience in terms of UI, but what it does have going for it is that it implements many of the things any hackspace might need and use:
It’s an incredibly good and powerful piece of software, but it’s written in PHP 
Ian.
Personally, I care less about what language it’s written in if it gives a powerful toolset that’s useful.
Ian.
From telegram:
Jonty Wareing:
I would actually be against using something like mailchimp for an approach, I think that should come from us via a normal email account, otherwise it has a high likelyhood of being seen as spam.
I also don’t think open tracking is actually a thing we need for ~30 contacts
That’s just overengineering it
I’d be happy to send them from my personal email if needed
from Telegram:
Jess Robinson:
Jonty Wareing
I would actually be against using something like mailchimp for a
I guess with 30-odd its not bad, and we’re not after long-term usage of the email pile really… folks that are interested after the initial ping can join discourse etc… we only used tools cos of fun with “emails to large groups” from some systems
It’s up to 45 now, but still relatively small. Agree on the spam comment. However, in my mind, this isn’t just a tool for day 1, it’s also an efficient way to manage lists (e.g. membership) and ongoing mass communications.
On the basis it would be useful longer term, is easy to setup and free - picking and using a tool from day one makes sense to me. That leaves the spam challenge to work around, but I’m sure that’s doable.
CiviCRM is actively used by fsf.org. seems a more holistic approach if this sort of tool is needed.
https://www.fsf.org/news/nonprofit-fundraising-civicrm
Hi all,
This is my first post here. I stumbled across this topic from a google search. Great effort and a good cause 
I’ve had a few good experiences in hackspaces (though haven’t been to many in the past few years) I would be happy to donate a day or so’s time to helping you work out if civicrm is right for you, and helping you get started. I can’t promise to commit much more than that, but it’d be a good start, and I’d always be available to answer questions (plus there are lots of other ways to get help, such as civicrm.stackexchange.com). If that would be useful, let me know. I’ve worked with CiviCRM since 2008 and am pretty experienced with it, and know the community well. I’m based 20 minutes north of Exeter at the minute, in case that is near anyone.
Since it was mentioned above, as well as being used by the FSF, it’s also used by EFF, the Wikipedia Foundation, and a few other techy-non profits (as well as many that are not technical ones).
Drop me an email at michaelmcandrew@thirdsectordesign.org if you’d like to chat some more.
I think the conversation might continue here:
Among them my favorite choice is mailchimp.
I’ve recently automated our mailing list using mailchimp’s rss function and these two plugins
It means that as long as we keep our google calendar up to date a list of all events in it for the following week gets sent out each weekend automatically.