Tag Archives: email

Attach a File

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Attach a File

eAdventist’s Mailing Lists are a powerful way to stay in touch with members in your church or conference. Now you can include file attachments in your messages – the agenda for your next board meeting, PDF announcing an upcoming event, registration forms, reports, photo images, and more. Just be sure that any file you want to send is under 9MB.

Here’s how it works. Create your message, then click on the “paperclip” icon and choose a file to attach. That’s it!

messageattachment

Here’s what it looks like in action!

messageattachment

Oh, and one more thing. If you’d like to see what you’re about to send to your entire list, you can now send a test message to yourself before clicking “Send” to everybody.

testemail

Extra power and insurance for your Mailing List.

Mailing Lists

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NOTE: Updated June 23, 2015. Add people to your Mailing List quicker — “invite” has been changed to “add”.

Is your church ready to use email for keeping in touch with members? Are you already using ConstantContact, MailChimp or Listbox but finding it challenging to manage the list as members come and go? eAdventist’s new Mailing Lists combine your membership data and Mandrill (MailChimp’s email engine) to give you high “deliverability” and easy list management.

Still need postal mail to stay in touch with members that don’t use email? Mailing Lists lets you create mailing labels for them without maintaining separate lists.

Try it out

If you have an eAdventist account with the “church clerk” or “pastor” role, you can try Mailing Lists. You’ll find “mailing lists” in the Reports menu section. Click the “New list” button. Fill in the “name”, “description”, “from name” and “from email” and use the defaults values for the other settings.

Save the new List and you’re ready to add some Subscribers.

Add your church and “Add subscribers” will show you the number of members (and nonmembers) that currently have email addresses.

For testing, let’s click on the “Add subscribers” link and add a few select people (e.g. yourself, your pastor) to the list.

Now you’ve got email subscribers and it’s time to create your first message. Let’s send it to the “entire list”.

New_Message

In case you haven’t run into this before, it’s important to create 2 versions of your message — “HTML” and “plain-text”. You can make the “HTML” version look spiffy by use bold, italics, links, colors, font sizes, bullet lists, images, etc. Be sure to try out the “Merge fields” that let you personalize the message for each recipient.

 

 

 

Edit_Message

The “plain-text” version looks like you wrote it on a typewriter. Why bother? Some of your subscribers may have chosen to reduce the risk of email attacks (e.g. phishing) by refusing HTML email. Your message will “bounce” and never reach them unless you include a “plain-text” version. You can use the “Merge fields”  in it, too.

Plain_Text_Message

That’s it! Save the message and you’re ready to send.

Send_Message

eAdventist has already established a good reputation (very important for mass email), so you message will usually be on it’s way in minutes. The Mandrill service that we use helps to ensure that it will be delivered as “mail” rather than blocked as “spam”. Check back on your message in a day or two to see if any of the email addresses had problems (e.g. bad address, rejected) and how many have already been opened.

Messages

Recipients

There’s more

Send a message to just a segment of your list using tags – great way to communicate with “growth groups”. You can also include photos in messages if they are hosted in a public location (e.g. Flickr). In the near future, you will be able to host them in eAdventist.

Conferences can also use Mailing Lists to stay in touch with their members, pastors or church officers. Contact our team if you would like more information about using Mailing Lists.