Email to MUG Members
Email to MUG Members
- Subject: Email to MUG Members
- From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 14:43:55 -0400
Wondered if I could run something by here, and ask if others have run
into the same issue.
From time to time, our MUG sends out email messages to all of our
MUG members who have email addresses. Things like meeting
notifications, etc.
Currently, we have an Exec we call the Treasurer who is also our
official keeper of membership records. So at all times he is the
person who has the "official" membership database.
Each month, usually at the Exec Mtg. but sometimes at the Regular
Mtg., he gives me a diskette with an updated copy of the membership
database. It is in an older version of FileMaker which, once I get
home and find a Mac that has a diskette drive, I can generally flip
over to my Mac running a more current version of FileMaker fairly
easily.
I then perform a little "audit" where I compare the contents of the
latest membership database to the records of our MUG Members which I
have in my OS X Mail application. I keep all the MUG Members info in
my main Mail application along with all my other contacts, but I have
a Group set up into which I put just the MUG Members. The monthly
"audit" is mainly to ensure that I have added any new members to and
removed any past members from my Mail Group. Periodically, I also
double-check that we both are using the same email address, etc.
So, from that point on, I can very easily send out email messages to
all our MUG members just by addressing the message to the MUG Member
Group, usually as a BCC.
Now, I see two issues with this arrangement. First, it is a little
tedious to be doing this monthly "audit". Second, it leaves us in a
situation where I can send out messages to all members easily but no
one else on the Executive can do so easily. If another Exec wants to
send a message, he or she pretty much has to send me a draft which I
then send out from my account. But I certainly don't want to
encourage others on the Executive to do each month what I am doing,
because my experience has been that when you start to get into
multiple "versions" of the same database, you will inevitably
increase the frequency of one or more of the versions being wrong.
One practical example of where this is a slight problem is that it
becomes ME who has to send on the monthly Apple User Group Bulletin
to our members. Our Apple Ambassador cannot be charged to do that
because he doesn't have access to a list of Member email addresses.
Our MUG, meanwhile, has a dot-Mac account. It seems to me that a way
to greatly reduce the workload and increase the functionality to all
the Executives might be as follows:
I create a new Account on my home Mac, specifically to be associated
with our MUG's dot-Mac account.
I set up the Address Book for this Account so that it includes one
Group for all current paid-up members and perhaps a second Group for
folks who fail to renew their memberships. I do a one time job of
entering all our current data.
I then give the dot-Mac account password to all or at least some of
our Executives. If I then Sync my MUG Account on my Mac to the Apple
Servers, I think that will allow our other Execs who have the
password to this dot-Mac account to access the MUG Address book,
where I am hoping they would be able to draft a message and send it
to all members by addressing it to the MUG Member Group rather than
having to address it separately to each member.
Now, it would be nice if I could also have our Treasurer/Membership
Records guy update the MUG dot-Mac Address Book but I don't think he
can do this unless he too has an OS X machine with a separate Account
for the MUG. Unfortunately, our chap is still using an OS 8 or 9
machine so I think I will still be stuck with doing the updates.
Can any of you confirm whether your MUG has already been using your
dot-Mac account for anything like this?
Jim Foster
President
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
Ph: (905) 263-4167
Email: email@hidden
http://www.mause.ca
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