email subscription

[mikelmaron]

• Email subscriptions for updates (all and for each project)

[heatherleson]

Can this be a newsletter sign up too?

I love how PubLab does it - http://publiclab.org/

[KathleenLD]

Per @heatherleson's 8/7 email to HOT list:

We have talked about having a monthly or quarterly newsletter. This is not firm yet, but a signup process (architected) will help us with the communications strategy to get more people learning about HOT (especially those who are not on the mailing list and just want the headline news)

Coordinator - ?
Skills - writing, wordpress plugins, email marketing knowledge

questions:
a. where should the newsletter sign up be on the site?
b. which email tool should we use?

[KathleenLD]

@heatherleson so depending on how many people you anticipate signing up, I'd strongly suggest using MailChimp as the tool. It's super easy to use and it's free up to 2000 subscribers.

[xamanu]

• Drupal has an internal tool to send newsletters: https://drupal.org/project/simplenews This works fine for simple Newsletters (especially without any nice design). One advantage is that articles from the website can easily be taken to send as email newsletters.
• Mailchimp is nice for more advanced newsletters (design and everything) and we can easily integrate an (un-)subscribe functionality in the website. But all contents have to be manually taken into a separate website (mailchimp.com), ordered,configured, etc. and then send to all subscribers. In my experience this leads often times to people sending information which should be (as well) on the website with the newsletter only. Or (at least some) information published on the website is not getting send by newsletter.

So the main difference is: Do we only want a RSS-Feed like newsletter functionality? Which tells people about the updates on the website and is useful, because people do no use RSS generally. Or do we want a full newsletter functionality, which requires additional editorial more work for the project members, in order to be reasonable.

[mikelmaron]

I think it really depends on who takes responsibility for managing the newsletter, and what they prefer.

[KathleenLD]

@mikelmaron agreed.

[harry-wood]

Well xamanu's question is... do we want a situation where somebody needs to have responsibility for managing a newsletter. ...or do we want the ability to email blog updates to subscribers (RSS-Feed like).

In the wider OpenStreetmap community we've had difficulty (or various stop-and-start attempts) at getting volunteers to produce something like a newsletter. Even though lots of people want it, getting it happening as a long term sustained volunteer effort is difficult.

But I think the original issue was just saying let's offer emailing of blog updates (a 'subscribe' button). That's a simple tech thing to implement and a good first step.

[xamanu]

Issue transfered here based on the common sense here in this issue: hotosm/hotosm-website#24
Closing.