Avalon Sailing Club
Mass Mail out (electronic) Instructions
Summary
This document is intended to provide information for club administrators on how to use the website-based mass email system to communicate with members.
Prerequisites
- Administrator level access to the website backend - see web administrators if not assigned
- Basic understanding of how to access the back end of the website and navigate around.
- Prepared email content – preferably not in PDF format, but so it can be copied/pasted. Word format is fine.
- Understanding of which groups you wish to target based on the ‘Groups of Interest’ in the user database.
( look at table below if unsure )
- Read these instructions first, so you understand the process
- About 20mins to complete the process.
High-level process view
- Log onto the backend and access the AcyMailing component.
- Create a new list based on a filtering of the membership (explained below)
- Create a new newsletter based on your pre-prepared content
- Associate you newly created newsletter with your newly created list and preview prior to sending
- Select ‘Send’ and monitor for successful sending.
- Delete list and delete newsletter if no longer required.
Detailed process steps
1/ Log onto the backend of the website and navigate to the mailing component (main top menu – ‘Components’. ‘Acymailing’)
http://www.avalonsailingclub.com.au/j/administrator/index.php
2/ Select ‘Lists’ from the menu the ‘Lists’ from the submenu. Click on the green ‘New’ button.
NOTE: list are generated once, and are not auto-updating. If you use an existing list you will not have any changes since the time the list was generated – the recommendation is to always generate a fresh new list before emailing.
3/ Give you list a new unique, recognisable name (leave all other settings unchanged) and select ‘save’
4/ Select ‘Click here to subscribe users to the list’
5/ You now need to build your filters – Always make the first one a ‘member’ filter as per below:
6/ Then click on ‘Add a filter’ and add your groups of interest filter as per below. Note than to select from multiple groups you need put a “pipe” | character between the group names. (| should be on your keyboard somewhere) e.g.
Note that the filter automatically runs and calculated the number of users that this would select. Check and see if this number makes sense i.e. I would not expect 120 members to have selected “Spirals’. A table of the current newsletter groups is below:
Club (everyone) / Yacht Cruising / Yacht RacingCentreboard / Etchells / Working Bees
29er / F11 / Spiral
Laser / MJ / Open BIC
Gold AM / Red / Blue
Gold PM / Blue W/L & Sail Camp / School Students
Instructors / Boat Boys
Note: These groups selections are not comprehensive – do not assume that everyone with an interest in a group has successfully ticked the box, or update their interests over time e.g. Centreboard sailors. AS an example, not everyone has ticked Centreboards despite having an interest in them, so getting into a “we sent you an email” argument is probably not going to be incontestable …
7/ When you have your targeted members, you can select ‘View users’ to see the first 20 and check if this looks correct i.e. are current members, probably have ticked this group etc. Note that view users might be less than the members shown above on the filters since it is the sub group results of both filters i.e. Blue/Red AND Member status (we have non-members also in the database). Then select ‘Process’
The selected members will be added to your list. Selected ‘Close’.
8/ From the main menu select ‘Newsletters/Newsletters’ then click on the green ‘New’ button.
9/ On the newsletter page:
- enter/add an Email Subject This will be both the subject line of your email and the name of the newsletter so select your subject with care!
- Set the published Selector to green/’Yes’
- Set the selector next to the list you previously created to green/’Yes’.
Ensure all other lists are de-selected (see below)
Click on the blue ‘Sender information’ text (see below) and update the fields ‘Reply to Name’ and ‘Reply to Email’ with your name and email address – or a more appropriate member if needed. Leave the ‘from’ addresses; these will populate with the default ‘Avalon Sailing Club’.
10/ Copy/paste your email content into the HTML section and check/fix up formatting as required. When happy with the email content, select ‘Save’
11/ Select ‘Preview/Send’
12/ Confirm on the preview screen that the number of users planned to be sent to is as expected and if the content appears correct, select ‘Send’
Monitor for successful completion of the send – note that the email system is set to send in batches.
13/ If there is no further use for your email/list, please delete – you are done!
Steve Read