Re: Email to MUG Members
Re: Email to MUG Members
- Subject: Re: Email to MUG Members
- From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:26:01 -0400
On 23-Oct-05, at 9:19 PM, Peggy Madsen wrote:
... the trouble with Yahoo Groups is that many average, otherwise
intelligent users can’t figure out how to get a Yahoo account,
thereby gaining access onto the groups we so efficiently have
created for them.
Since I started this thread, I will just say that our MUG does offer
our paid-up members the privilege of registering for a "discussion
list" which we run under the topica.com site. We too initially found
that trying to send an email to our paid-up members explaining the
process they had to follow in order to get themselves set up on this
list was problematic. For one thing, they had to go through a number
of steps just to request an account, then I had to logon as the list
admin to approve those requests, and then they had to take a second
run at the system to finalize their access.
A short time after we started this list, we discovered that the list
admin had a way to send an electronic invitation from the list server
out to the club member. THIS turned out to have a much better success
rate in terms of getting people registered, partly because the club
member only had to do one thing which essentially was to respond
favourably to the invitation.
Nevertheless, in spite of all this, I would say that we only have
about 70% to 80% of our eligible members registered for our mail
list. You need to understand that the principle rationale for the
List was to provide our members with the means to ask a question or
relate some problem they were having in a way that their issue could
be seen by ALL of the club rather than just a single point of contact
like the President or some other individual in the club who had a
reputation for being the "Mac expert". The list was never billed as
being the way that our Executive wanted to send out meeting notices
and such to members. It's possible that our participation rate MIGHT
be higher if we had decided to use the List in this manner, but I
somehow doubt it.
All of which brings me back to my initial point which was to find a
simple way to address an email message to ALL of our paid up members,
and to make it simple for any of our Executives to do that without
getting into a situation where each Executive has their own version
of a membership database which may or may not be current and accurate.
Subject to getting all the Execs using Macs which are capable of
running Mac OS X, I still think that using the "Sync" capabilities of
our dot-Mac account is the most promising way we have yet found to do
this.
I have not found any indication anywhere that there is a hard limit
on how many Macintosh computers Apple allows to sync to a common dot-
Mac account. Our club has eight Execs, some with more than one Mac,
but not all of whom necessarily want to have access to an Address
Book that contains all our members, so I think we'll be fine once we
get the last few hold outs to upgrade to a newer Mac!!
Jim Foster
President
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
http://www.mause.ca
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