Experience.FellowshipOne.com

Does anyone use an e-newsletter program, such as Constant Contact? If so, how do you keep your Fellowship One data, such as emails, updated?

We have used Constant Contact for our weekly all church email newsletters for over a year. Constant Contact is an excellent system. The interface between Constant Contact and Fellowship One is manual. Here are the basic steps I use. 1. Weekly import from Fellowship One to Constant Contact of new individuals with email, name, city, state. 2. Weekly processing of Constant Contact hard bounces (invalid address, no account, etc). Using Excel and Pivot tables I look for 3 hard bounces for an email. Then I remove from Constant Contact and Fellowship One. 3. Weekly processing of Constant Contact unsubscribes. Using Word Mail Merge I send an email to each unsubscribe asking if they want themselves and their family removed from the church. If answer is Yes the individuals are dropped in Fellowship One. 4. Quarterly match of all Constant Contact emails to Fellowship One emails. Using Excel and table lookup I identify all Fellowship One emails not in Constant Contact. I then import those to Constant Contact. I do not import from Constant Contact as new subscribes there are not generally our church attendees. Dan Lott - danl@baysideonline.com

I'm not sure if this is something you'd be interested in, but...We were using a list server created on our website previous to F1. Now we're in the process of switching over to just using F1 because we want to keep everything centralized (the boast of F1). We created an attribute grouping of E-newsletters and then have attributes such as Bulletin by email, News & Views (letter from the pastor), Men's Newsletter, etc. When someone wants to receive that e-newsletter, we assign them that attribute and create a people list via query builder and send out a group email (2.0 beta because it's the best). This works pretty well with the contact forms from Sunday mornings cards, as you can add attributes to the form and when checked it automatically assigns the attribute to that person. We haven't yet set up a way to sign up from our website (which I'm sure we will in the near future). We may just have an email sent to a specific person in the office and then they will assign the attribute to that person manually.

Using attributes can work with an individual manually maintaining lists. You will need to think about also using status as many people who request addition to a list are not attendees or members. They may only want to be on one list.