This week’s Missiotechnica… Taking our “Prayer/News Letters” to the next level is so easy a monkey could do it.
Communication from the field can be a daunting task for many. However, we do need to recognize the fact that the days of the “Missionary Prayer Letter” are over. Done. Gone. The folks left stamping and addressing envelopes are few and far between. My Grandmother (who is well into her 80’s) has an email address. Heck, she has a Facebook account. Most workers are at least using email to send out communication to our consitituency, because the majority of our constituency isn’t going to read a mass mailing that they get in the mailbox. I know, there will be a few who insist that they will. However, there are some pretty amazing statistics about who reads this stuff ... I'll show you the e-version in just a moment.
I want to share a couple of “don’ts” when it comes to using email for our prayer/news letters and one “do”.
Don’t (ever, ever, ever) send an email to multiple receivers so that everyone can see your “Send to” addresses.
This is bad, bad, bad for multiple reasons. Many ISPs (Internet Service Providers) will consider you a spammer and will block your email to begin with. If your emal does get through, it becomes a security risk for everyone on your list. Then when one of your constituents hit “reply all” and responds to everyone your list to say “thanks” … well … best case, you’re not winning friends or supporters, and many people will just be annoyed and never hear what you have to say. Worst case, you've opened up your entire mailing list to dangers from spam to viruses. Use the BCC (blind carbon copy) feature in your email software. Please, please. I am STILL getting newsletters from colleagues with 217 people in the “send to” list. Just stop it. Drop everyone into the BCC field and put your email address in the “To” field. That is a much better way of getting your communication out.
Don’t embed photos in your email that are more than about 500–600 kb
That means … don’t take the pictures directly out of your camera and drop them into your email newletter. I recieved a newsletter from a colleague a few weeks ago that was over 40MB. Again, many service providers and email servers will block large files from ever getting through, and you’ll never know whether they received your email or not. There are a few who are creating newletters in PDF format and sending them (we have done that for a long time). This is better, but you still have to watch your file size. The total weight of the email shouldn’t be much over 1.5MB, at least in my opnion. You get much larger than that and you'll begin having a hard time getting your message through without being flagged as a potential spammer.
I will stop with these two don’ts … because I want tospend more time on the “do” …
DO use Mailchimp
This has become one of my favorite communication tools. I used to be a little hesitant to recommend MailChimp to colleagues, as there was (and probably still is) a bit of a learning curve. However, recent improvements have made creating an e-communicaiton easy and secure. There is no reason why every international worker in the world shouldn’t be using MailChimp for communication. It easy. It's secure. The Mailchimp monkeys do all of the work for you.
I’m going to give you a quick-start tutorial right here. There are tons of cool features that you can explore. But in 10 minutes or less, you can send out an email to your constituency that looks good, communicates well, gives your receivers control over how much (or how little) they hear from you and, from an awesome stalker-y perspective, you can see exactly who reads you letter, how many times people open your letter and where they click in your letter. So awesome.
The other nice thing is that your subscribers can control whether they remain on your list or not (don’t take it personal - but some people get tired of hearing from us). MailChimp also gives you code to create a signup form on your website and more.
Sign up. Send a campaign. Try out the features. I think you’ll soon love these guys as much as I do.
And I think the people to whom you are communicating will love you.
And isn’t love where it’s at?
If you have a question or some better ideas of how to use these kinds of communication tools, leave your 2 cents in the comments!