Where's my Email? Part 1

Email fundraising can be both good and bad. Since nobody writes so much on paper anymore, email could be a good alternative to sharing your message. I am not averse to it, because we use it to! This approach is especially good in times of calamity where you really, really need to get the word out to as many channels as possible.

But email has its challenges. The first challenge is coming up with a list of email addresses to send your messages to.

Second, if you won't be careful, your email could end up in your recipient's SPAM BOX. Yeah, you read it right. Its not the blue can, its the electronic kind.

Third is timing. If you send it at the wrong time, your email will easily be the 66th email that your recipient may miss it. Fourth, a lot of people have multiple email addresses, their "official" company email, their Yahoo address, because everyone has it. Gmail because its cool. Hotmail, Rocketmail, Eudoramail, heck, they may even have an email address from their internet provider, i.e. username@pldtmydscl or username@globelines.com.

Email has its pros too by the way. Up to a certain point, sending email is free. Once you get to the level that you are sending to 150 addresses, then things start to get messy. What do you do when you've gathered up 500 addresses, how about 5,000? Will you enter the addresses each time? One-by-one? All 5,000 of it? (I'm exagerating, of course.) You can links to multimedia content--photos, videos, audio--that the user experience may be richer. Plus you can lay an email out as if its a webpage.

Also, there are free softwares out there that could help you. Batch sending, filtering, segmenting list, etc. But you won't have the ease of use, clear documentation and tech support that a service provider can give you. That is why for almost a year now, our organization has opted to go with a paid service since managing the lists and making the work easier has become a priority to increase productivity.

More to come tomorrow!
God bless!