Tag Archives: pastors

Email Addresses – Some Examples

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Email Addresses – Some Examples

Are there officers in your church or conference that use a “work” or “officer” email address as well as their “personal” or “home” email address? eAdventist provides a simple but powerful way to track both addresses and always know that you’re using the right one.

Pastor with a Work Email Address

A typical example is a Pastor Fred who uses “pastorfred@meadowglade.org” for work mail and “fred@bedrock.com” for personal mail. Enter the personal/home email address on the Person page. This address will be used by Person Labels and Mailing List that are for members (“by organization”).

person_officer_email_2

Then enter the work address in the “Other” field on the Officer page. This address will be used by Officer Labels and Mailing Lists that are for officers (“by office”).

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Both email addresses are now displayed on the Person page.

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Treasurer with an Officer Email Address

This also works well for a church treasurer who uses an email address like “treasurer@firstchurch.org” that is provided by the conference or church. Enter her personal email (“maria@gmail.com”) on her Person page, then enter the officer email (“treasurer@firstchurch.org”) on the Officer page as “Other”.

Member with Several Personal Email Addresses

Occasionally, you may have a member that wants to provide more than one personal email address. You can enter them in the “Email” field on the Person page, separated by semi-colons. All of the addresses will be used for reports, like the Church Directory or Member List. However, eAdventist will only use the first address for Person Labels and Mailing Lists.

The combination of “personal” and “officer” email addresses in eAdventist provide a simple but powerful way to handle multiple email addresses for a member.

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.

New & improved Notes

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Until now, Notes for a person had to fit into a single field with a 500-character limit. Clerks and pastors can now create multiple Notes (no limit on size) with “happened on” dates. All existing Notes have been converted to a new Note with “date unknown”.

To create a Note, just click on the “Add a note” link.

Notes_1

As you enter the new Note, you have the option to choose the “Happened on” date.

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Saved Notes display with the most recent at the top.

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Right now, the “Who can see this?” drop-down only offers “Everyone”. This is how the Notes field has always worked. In the near future, options will be added to allow pastors and clerks to add private notes.