communication department

By Tricia Spayer, Chapter President

What It Is

Constant Contact is a commercial service that allows you to create email promotions, send email newsletters, or build email lists, among other services.

Why We Needed It

Community leaders know the importance of communicating regularly with STC members. Most information we receive comes through email communication. Although it's fine to send some messages through your regular email account, what happens when you have hundreds of email addresses to manage, and need to allow multiple committee members to contact your membership?

Through the past several years, we kept a basic text document of our chapter member list, which was updated fairly regularly and distributed to several committee chairs for making announcements to the chapter. The challenge we encountered was that not every committee chair had the updated list each time a mass email was sent.

Another challenge was the pain of mass email distribution. Using my company's email system was out of the question and using my Yahoo account I encountered errors that stated I was trying to send too many emails at once. I had to break up the list of email addresses and send emails to each group, waiting over an hour between groups before my service would let me do this.

An additional issue was that members did not want their email addresses to appear in mass emails. This was not an issue when we remembered to enter their addresses in the blind copy (BCC) field, but not everyone remembered this all the time. Finally, some senders' email addresses could have been considered Spam by recipients' servers. In these cases, we did not know if everyone received the messages.

Why We Chose Constant Contact

One of our new members had been using this service for other STC communities and at work. Using Constant Contact helped us distribute mass emails to (the former Region 4) STC members to promote a regional conference that we held in October 2007. This was a successful and professional-looking campaign. We signed up for a 60 day trial account to evaluate the Constant Contact service.

The trial was so successful that our board voted to purchase an account for the NEO STC Community.

Notifying Members

Prior to using Constant Contact, we had a monthly mailer to our members that announced events. We voted to reduce the number of mailers to twice a year. In the first mailer following our decision, we announced that we were beginning to use Constant Contact. We advised members to "white list" the appropriate Constant Contact email address. We also advised them to make sure their email addresses were properly updated in the STC database, as we use the community reports to update our contact lists.

Constant Contact's Services

Constant Contact provides email marketing capabilities, pre-designed templates, and an optional survey function. You can maintain multiple email lists such as an active member list and a non-member list. You can upload email lists from .xls, .txt, .csv files, or from Outlook or Quickbooks.

The service creates reports such as the number of people that opened each email, the number of forwards, and the number of unique click-throughs (when someone follows a hyperlink that you have provided in the email message).

The service has an Anti-Spam policy that you must follow in creation of your lists. There is also an Anti-Spam tool that you can use to check your messages for potential bounces.

There is a service discount when you pre-pay for the service in 6 or 12 month intervals. According to their website, "A non-profit organization can receive a 20% discount off our standard pricing when prepaying for 6 months or a 30% discount when prepaying for 12 months, at your current contact level. There is no discount when you pay monthly."

The pricing depends on the number of contacts you manage. The lowest price level allows you to manage up to 500 email addresses. The next level ranges from 501 - 2,500 email addresses, and so forth. The Survey service has an additional cost, although bundle pricing is available.

Creating Messages

Constant Contact has many professionally designed templates available. We found a template we liked and customized it. It is easy to edit one topic at a time, remove topics, change topic positions, and add other formatted features to the message. This provides a consistent look between messages and allows several authors to contribute to the same message.

Why We Like It

We have found this service quite useful in communicating with our members. It has been most revealing in the reports section, where we have learned how many people have opened emails. If we provide a link to a page on our website, we can tell how many people have clicked through.

This click-through feature is interesting: In our email template, we have a navigation bar that mimics the navigation bar on our website. We have noticed that EVERY time a Constant Contact message has been sent, someone has clicked-through to our Jobs page. Note that not every recipient's email server feeds information back to Constant Contact, so the numbers reported are generally lower than the actual number of opened e-mails or click-throughs. Still, this information is quite useful.

Multiple committee chairs have access to our account and can send messages without relying on one or two people to format and send a message.

While the vast majority of technical communicators may gloss over marketing concepts, it is important for professional organizations to maintain a consistent look and feel, the same principles we bring to our jobs. Using a third-party system allows the community to make sure all communications are well vetted, well designed, and professional.

Learning More

To learn more, visit Constant Contact. You can get a free 60-day trial service. In that time, you can upload contact information, create or modify templates, and send messages. This service has many useful tutorials, a searchable knowledge database, and a user community.

Tricia Spayer is President of the Northeast Ohio Chapter.