This time round we take a look at the most common methods available to send out “bulk” emails,  i.e.  emails to many recipients (like newsletters and appeals) as opposed to just a few recipients. 

There are three major ways of sending out bulk emails:

• Via your own email client (like Outlook) – either by placing all recipients in the BCC field or by using an email distribution list
   
• Via  a program specifically designed for sending bulk emails that is installed on a PC or server at your offices
   
• Via a specialist bulk email sending company like AWeber, Constant Contact or Sign-Up.to

All have pros and cons.  Here are some of the key ones and our personal advice on where you can benefit – or slip up – using each of them.

Your own email client

Pros:

• It’s immediately available – probably already running on your desktop, so nothing more to pay.
   
• You already know how to use it.

Cons:

• It is incredibly easy to make a mistake and put recipient addressed in the To or CC field of the email – meaning that every recipients email address is sent to every person and your organisation has instantly breached both UK Data Protection laws and spam laws in every continent!
   
• You need to remember to put in the legal “stuff” (like registered addresses and unsubscription links) in to each email.
   
• You need to manage subscribe and unsubscribe requests yourself.
   
• Emails to more than a few recipients are likely to get blocked by the spam filters on your local PC or your email server.
   
• The sudden volume of outbound emails may be a lot for your email server to handle all at one time, resulting in other day-to-day emails being delayed while you server works to handle your mailing.
   
• If you mess anything up and your email domain gets onto any spam blacklists, you may well stop all email from your organisation from getting through and bring email communication to a total halt until you can get your organisations email server de-listed.
  Even if you do it perfectly, someone can still report you for spam and it will be up to you to prove your innocence.   In the world of spam blacklisting you are sadly often deemed guilty until proven innocent!
   
• You will need to understand what all the non-delivery reports you get back mean in order to manage re-sends and mail list removals.
  If you don’t know the difference between a “hard bounce” and a “soft bounce” – and their error codes – and what you need to do if you get one or more of each type to an email address within a certain time period to keep on the right-side of spam laws, then this probably isn’t the right solution for you!

Our view:

We wouldn’t recommend this unless you only have a few (under 50) subscribers and really understand what you are doing when it comes to email legalities and email delivery and error report codes.
 

Dedicated bulk email program on your PC

Pros:

• They are relatively cheap to buy and you don’t have many (if any) further costs.
   
• They are relatively easy to use and many provide additional features – to help you design good looking emails for example or to automatically add the “legal” bits for example.

Cons:

• Most of the disadvantages listed above for personal email clients (other than the first one).
   
• By default, most use their own email server software to send and track emails, so you need to make sure that any anti-spam settings on your outward server (or even possibly your ISP) are configured to expect bulk emails from it.
   
• Not all of them are particularly accurate at tracking whether emails have reached their destination or not. As well as messing up your statistics, this can lead to you re-sending emails that were incorrectly reported as not having gone through but really had done – leading to subscribers receiving multiple copies which at best will annoy them and at worst may see you being incorrectly reported as a spammer.
   
• If your email recipients are split over several lists, not all of them are able to flag up duplicate sends where the same email address it in multiple lists – which means that subscribers receive multiple copies, with the same results as above.
   

Our view:

This can be a cheap and effective solution.  But you really understand what you are doing when it comes to email legalities and email delivery and error report codes.  If a paid member of staff is handling this, don’t forget to take into consideration the cost of their time learning and administering the program into account – these “hidden” ongoing costs can mean that this isn’t always the cheap and easy solution it appears to be.

Specialist bulk email sending company

Pros:

• They handle all the “legal bits” for you – all you need to worry about is the content!
   
• They have their own email deliver servers, which are specially designed to handle large volumes of emails quickly and efficiently.
   
• Most provide easy to use software for designing your emails as part of the package.
   
• Some include special checking software that you can run to ensure that your email isn’t likely to fall foul of spam filters or other reasons for non-delivery.
   
• Their software automatically handles subscribe and unsubscribe requests for you.
   
• Most provide extra email features like auto-responders that allow follow-up messages to be scheduled and sent automatically.
   
• Some include integration to other information delivery methods such as Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to reach donors and supporters in many different mediums via one single place.
   
• Most include tracking and analytical tools that enable you to quickly and easy monitor deliver and read rates – and report and analyse trends over time or a particular campaign.
   
• If anyone should make a spam complaint about one of your emails sent using one of these services, the company will help sort things out.  And in the meantime, your own organisations day-to-day email won’t be affected.
   

Cons:

• Some offer low price (or free) trials for low subscriber numbers and/or time periods, but after that you will need to pay a monthly or yearly charge which depending on your subscriber numbers (and how often you mail then) can be significant – so costs can mount up unexpectedly if you don’t keep an eye on numbers.
   
• In order to ensure that they stay on the right side of spam legislation (and don’t have their other customers emails blocked) most impose restrictions on the methods by which you can add subscribers.  Though uploading your existing subscriber-base should be no problem, many require that new subscribers are added using “double opt-in” and some specifically ban you from using emails from purchased marketing email lists.
   
• Your subscriber data (email name at minimum) needs to be stored on their servers, so you (or subscribers) may have concerns about privacy or data confidentiality.  In practice this isn’t normally a real problem at all (all the specialist companies have tight security procedures) but there may be a perceived risk.  And if you are using a company whose servers are not based in the UK, you may need to check (and possibly amend) your own organisations published privacy policy.
   
• You are not totally in control of the whole email delivery mechanism – which some organisation may not be comfortable with.  Also subscribers may worry that their email address has been shared with others if  they see a mention of another organisation at the end of your emails (like the Sign-Up.to one at the end of our newsletters) or when subscribing or unsubscribing.  In practice, most internet users are well used to this concept and unworried by it, but if your subscriber base is more conservative or less “internet savvy” then you might need to give them extra reassurance.
   

Our view:

If you have thousands of subscribers, this probably the only practical solution unless you want to employ (or train to be) an email delivery specialist and your email servers really have the capacity to handle the huge volume of email. 

If you have fewer subscribers, you need to balance the benefits against the costs.  Make  sure you take into account not only the time spent sending the emails, but the measured risk to your organisation if you did end up on a spam blacklist – and the time and effort to get off it, which after having to do this for other organisations ourselves we can vouch can be a painful and costly process and one which is best avoided!

Though we are IT specialists and a lot of our time is spent working with email delivery in some shape form (so we do have some level of expertise in this area), this is the solution we choose to use ourselves.  Even though our mailing list is pretty tiny compared to some of the organisations we work with, we still find that outsourcing this part of our communication to an outside specialist organisation saves us time and money overall.

As well as the bad-feeling and potential loss of reputation and trust (and donations!) that comes with upsetting potential donors and supporters with unwanted emails, if the email was sent via your own organisations servers then there is a significant risk that all your organisations email can be blocked as your domain gets blacklisted.

A significant number of charities (or individuals working for charities) still don’t really understand spam laws or realise that they even apply to charities.  In fact they not only apply to charity emails, but unless the charity or NFP is promoting commercial products (through a trading arm for example) then the organisation can not even take advantage of the “soft opt-in” relaxation of rules that commercial organisations can utilise.

And if any of your subscribers are overseas (such as the US) you also need to make sure that you don’t fall foul of the recipient countries spam laws either.  This is particularly true of  the USA and the CAN-SPAM laws there – and since many email servers used by UK residents are based in the US (Hotmail, GMail, Livemail etc) then you can find yourself blocked by US servers you never knew you were sending to!

Though strictly speaking spam laws apply to emails sent to individuals not companies, any email sent to a personal address for someone at that company (e.g bob.smith@company.co.uk rather than accounts@company.co.uk) is also deemed to be sent to an individual so is covered by spam laws too.

In order to keep on the right side of spam laws, here are six key things you need to make sure you do*:

1. Explicitly get permission to send each person emails (opt-in).  You can’t just assume they won’t mind or claim that they accepted because there was some small print on the back of something they filled in for you or because an out-of-date privacy policy on your website says that they are deemed to have accepted by doing something vaguely related at some point in the past.  If you do ever get reported for spamming, you may well need to provide detailed information about your “opt-in” policy and evidence that the person making the complaint did opt in to your emails (and jump through a whole host of extra hoops) before your email domain can be removed from the blacklist.
     
2. Provide a really clear (and working!) method for a recipient to opt-out of receiving email from you - in every bulk email you send to them.  Thought you will still be legally covered if your opt-in link is buried somewhere more obscure in your emails, it is best to make it really obvious and really easy to follow. 
   These days it is incredibly easy for users to press a button in their email program to say that they think a message is spam – and if they do this in one of the online services like AOL or Hotmail then you can find your mails to all other users there have been incorrectly classified as spam too.
   Basically you want to be sure that it is easier for a user to contact you to unsubscribe than to press the spam button!
    
3. You must deal with any opt-out requests promptly (US laws give you 10 days, the UK is a little more generous!) and must continue to honour them and not send any more bulk emails to that person unless the specifically request you to do so at a later time.
    
4. Make sure that you include who the email is from and contact details.  For emails that may be deemed from a commercial organisation (such as a trading arm) and/or may go to the US and be covered by US laws you also need to include your postal address (and company registration number if applicable).
    
5. Make sure that the title of the email accurately reflects what the email is about.  Though this may not explicitly be law in the UK (it is in the US) doing this engenders greater trust from your readers and (again) stops them reaching for the spam button.
    
6. Make sure whatever program you use to send your bulk emails keeps the privacy of recipients secure – you must be sure that one recipient can not get the emails of other recipients either directly from your email or by replying to it.  In other words, make sure you don’t send to multiple recipients by putting all their names in the To or Cc field of an email and that any email distribution lists used are set to handle replies correctly. 
   Failure to do this breaches most Data Protection laws in addition to any Anti-Spam ones!

There is a lot more we could add here, but this blog entry runs the risk of turning into a book if we do.  There are some links to further information below, but if you have any questions or would like more information on anything we have covered here, then please contact us or leave a comment – and if we can help or point you in the right direction (on the understanding that we do IT, we aren’t lawyers*) we will be more than happy to do so.

Further reading:

ICO – Data Protection Good Practice Note – Charities and Marketing (PDF document) – a short & easy to read document that outlines requirements with particular reference to charities

ICO – Data Protection Good Practice Note  – Electronic Mail Marketing (PDF document) – also short & easy to read

ICO - Guidance for marketers on the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003
(PDF document) – much longer & contains much more detailed information but still pretty easy to read and full of useful information

Scotch Spam – Anti Spam Law - a site set up to try and stamp out spam by encouraging individuals to complain – the Spam Law page contains lots of information and links to key websites

FTC – The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business -  US Federal Trade Commission site giving information about the US CAN-SPAM act – a little “wordy” in places but overall pretty clear & useful

Staying on the E-mail Up and Up: What Nonprofits Need to Know about CAN-SPAM – a short but useful guide specifically relating to non-profit organisations and the CAN-SPAM act with some good clear basic guidance

* Usual legal disclaimers apply - this information is provided as guidance only and is not a substitute for professional legal advice.  We are not (and don’t claim to be) lawyers, so please consult your own legal representatives if you think it necessary.

There are both silly and sensible prizes to be won, including 2 months of free telephone/remote support.

You don’t have to be an artistic or green-fingered genius to win so why not give it a go.  Just visit:

               http://www.charitysolutions.co.uk/summer.html

and fill in the form there or give us a ring or email your details to sales@charitysolutions.co.uk  and we will take it from there.

Please do at least think about entering – and pass the message on to anyone you know who also works for a UK charity.  While we don’t want to give current entry numbers away, let’s just say that the odds of winning are currently in your favour!

This time we cover two key ways in which you can keep your mail files down to a manageable size – without resorting to mass deletion of emails you would really like to keep.  Again these solutions are only applicable if your emails get delivered to personal mail files – if your mail stays on the server then other solutions will be required.  If you are not sure, then ask your system administrator – or us!

Each of the methods we suggest has its own advantages and disadvantages. Opinion on which one is best is divided – even amongst the Charity Solutions team.  You will need to pick the one that you think will work best for you and best matches any data handling procedures your organisation has in place.  If you don’t like it, you can always change later – but the main thing is to do something now - before your mailbox explodes!

Archiving

The first method is archiving.  This is automated process where Outlook automatically moves mails over a certain age into a separate folder. You need to set it up but after that it basically runs by itself without intervention.

The advantages of this method are that once it is set up you don’t need to worry about it (Outlook does it automatically) and that the process happens relatively seamlessly and you should not notice any appreciable loss in speed while it takes place.

The main disadvantage of archiving is that it your mails are split over two or more areas, so if you are hunting for a specific mail message you’ll need to look in more than one place.

If you use archiving it is still important that you check the archive size once in a while to make sure it hasn’t grown too big. Archive files are no different to any other type of mail file and they can explode just as easily if not monitored and kept in check. In order to avoid your archive file growing out control we suggest that you create and use a new one each year.

Multiple PST files

The other main way of dealing with mail is to work on a divide and conquer principle and split all your emails over several PST files.  Outlook allows you to use and view multiple PST files at any time – you are not limited to just one.

This means that you can store all emails relative to a particular subject together – for example all mails to and from a particular supplier or about a particular project.  You can even set up rules within Outlook to automatically file mails into the correct areas.  This means that (providing you remember the theory you used to file it!) you can easily track down a specific mail regardless of when you received it.

This total control of where emails end up is probably the biggest advantage of the multiple PST file approach.  The main disadvantage is probably that the process isn’t automatic – but whether that really is a disadvantage probably depends on how you like to work and organise your emails.

With this method you will still have to keep an eye on the size of your PST files, but by dividing your mail like this you got much better control and it’s far less likely that your email PST files will exceed the 2GB limit.

Logging in to your Outlook to be either confronted with warning messages or, worse still, corrupted data files or missing emails, is something that can strike terror into anyone.

In this post we look at the single most important check you can make to help avoid this happening  to you – and (in our next post) what to do if the warnings are already there.  It is based on Microsoft Outlook, but a lot of the information holds true for other email clients too – though the ways of doing things will of course we different.

Also, the information below applies only if you download your email messages into local files rather than keeping them all on the mail server.  If you don’t know which applies in your case, then please ask whoever deals with your IT internally.  Or us!

First of all, let’s identify the number one cause of these problems – and how to check if you might be affected.

Outlook can only cope with Data Files (Personal Folders and Archive files) up to a certain size.
…. if they are bigger, then it is a case of when (not if) disaster will occur

• If the files have been created in the newer format (not 97-2002 compatible) using the most recent version of Outlook (2007) or the most recent Service Packed version of Outlook 2003 (SP3 or above) then you can have files up to 20GB
• If any of the files were created in an earlier version, even if you are using the most recent version now, the absolute maximum size of any file is 2GB.  In practice any file over 1.8GB is highly likely to cause problems soon (if it hasn’t already) so you should take steps now to reduce it.

If you are not 100% sure which version of Outlook you have, then the easiest way to find out is to click on Help -> About Microsoft Outlook.  The window that pops up will tell you the version (and Service Pack) you are running.

But unless you have only recently created your Outlook profile and files from scratch, there is a fair chance that you may be working with files created with the older restrictions – so unless you are 100% sure, stick to the 1.8GB limit.

To find out what size your Outlook data files are:

• Look at the file size by browsing to the area(s) where they are stored in My Computer

or

• Right-Click on the top level of the folder in the left-hand Outlook pane
  Choose Properties
  Click on the Folder Size button and wait for your machine to count up the total

If you are not used to checking computer file sizes, the number of digits can get a bit confusing – let alone working out how many KB or MB in a GB!

Normally the results are displayed in KB.  If your file size is less than 1 800 000 KB (add another 0 to this if you are sure you are using files created in the latest version) then you should be ok for now.  But if it is close to or more than that, you need to take action immediately if you are to avoid huge problems later.

And remember, if you have more than one data file (including archive files) you will need to check each one separately.

And if any of your files are to big, what do you do next?

First of all make sure that you have deleted anything in your Deleted Items folder – unless your Outlook is set up to do this automatically on exit (which by default it isn’t) then there may be hundreds of files in there.

But there are other more long-term ways of re-arranging how your email files are stored to keep the folder sizes down.  We will cover some of the most common options next time.

Any comments or queries … or suggestions for follow up topics that you would like us to cover? Just leave a comment or contact us (details on the About Us page) and we will do our best to help.

This is available to all our Blog readers totally free of charge from http://www.charitysolutions.co.uk/db_rep_blog.html

Hope you find the report useful.  Any comments (good or bad!) are very welcome.

Being able to work from home in comfortable surroundings or having the ability to access your work computer files while away from the office used to be an expensive luxury not within easy reach of your typical small organisation. However, many organisations, large and small, now can have some form or another of remote access to their network without having to break the bank.

Simply put, remote access is a service that provides access to information and applications on your network from locations other than your normal place of work.

Many technologies are on the market to enable this kind of access, including:

• Software – either included with operating system or purchased separately
• Web-based applications
• Blackberries
• Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)

Over the next few blogs we shall be looking at the pros and cons of various types of remote access available and which ones are potentially the most beneficial to organisations without huge IT resources or budgets.

Hope you like the new design. If you have any views, comments or suggestions, just let us know – leave a comment or contact us (details on the About Charity Solutions page).

If you look in the link area on the right of each page, you will see a whole set of new little links and icons to allow you to keep up to date via an RSS feed, Google Feed or Technorati.

Or if the the whole RSS thing doesn’t appeal, you can now get an email update every time we update the blog – just click on the Get an Email Update… link and follow the instructions.  If you sign up using this service, Feedburner (who manage the updates for us) will send you an email in the afternoon (UK time) after we make an update with details of the new blog entry.

Hope you find the new services useful.  If you need any help setting it up – or just getting to grips about what this whole RSS feed thing is about – just contact us (details on the About Charity Solutions page) or leave us a comment and we will do our best to help.

Take Skype for example. Skype – and other similar services such as Gizmo – allow users to make telephone calls over the internet to other users of the same service free of charge. This communication method has its benefits although there are a few potential downsides that you need to consider as well.

Services such as Skype are fast gaining in popularity. Calling between computers both using the chosen service is completely free, obviously an appealing feature to many people. Most of the services also offer the ability to call “normal” telephone numbers (mobile or land lines) at fairly competitive rates – often really competitive for international calls. Some providers also provide an additional service that (for a monthly or yearly fee) provides you with an incoming phone number. This is a fantastic way to get a number in (depending on the provider) the town or country you want – giving you a pseudo-presence there and making it cheaper for you colleagues, or supporters in that area to call you.

However, though the services are generally reliable, we would not advise relying on them as your only method of telephony – incoming or outgoing. If the service does fail (as happened for several days last year to many SkypeIn users for example) you will be left without any method of telephone contact – which not only will cause major inconvenience but does little for your professional profile.

According to the majority of users the audio is generally superb but the big question is really is it secure to use in an office environment? Each provider will have their own individual security features, so let’s take Skype as an example.

When calling Skype to Skype the calls are strongly encrypted so therefore at the higher end in the security stakes compared to other things that use the internet. If using Skype to call to mobile or landlines however, the calls are only encrypted for the Skype portion and not when they hit the public domain. This is fine if you have offices dotted about the country, or world, and you can implement a company-wide policy of Skype usage between offices, but if you are a smaller organisation mainly communicating with customers using a regular landline/mobile service you cannot guarantee the complete security of the conversations. This is not to say that using Skype is more of a threat to charities than other ‘techie’ tools, such as email, but because Skype is newer the vulnerabilities may not be as well known.

Compliance and protection of information within organisations is also a hot topic these days. Organisations need not only to know what information is entering and leaving the office but also to log and archive it as well. It is difficult for third party applications (ie monitoring tools) to interface with Skype. This makes it very difficult to know exactly what information is entering or leaving the organisation. Sensitive information could be passed on with no way of tracking where and from whom it originated.

Perhaps the answer is not to ban Skype flat-out but if you are going to consider its use, then control it – as you do with email. Policies on acceptable usage, such as no file transfers, and cautions against using it for sensitive communications, should be written and enforced.

Any comments, queries or suggestions for follow up topics that you would like us to cover? Just leave a comment or contact us (details on the About Us page) and we will do our best to help.