If you want to run an email campaign to send messages to your supporters, you’ll first need a platform to manage your mailing list. This platform is called a mailer, and it’s necessary to help you track your list of contacts and send emails to everyone on your list. Without a mailer, you’d either be sending dozens of individual emails, or CC’ing a whole bunch of people on one thread - neither are effective for an email campaign.
Mailer platform recommendations
If you don’t have a mailer yet, and your budget is over $25k, consider signing up for NGP (or EveryAction if your organization is not a campaign). These platforms will help with financial compliance in addition to providing access to a mailer.
If your budget is smaller than $25k, consider signing up for MailChimp. This is a standard commercial mailer that should meet all of your needs.
If you’re not ready to sign up for a dedicated email platform, then don’t create a sign up form yet. We don’t recommend posting sign up forms that don’t sync to a mailer because you likely will not use the collected contact information effectively. Your supporters might wonder why you never reach out, and they might think you just aren’t running any programs. Come back to this step once you have a mailer platform.
If you really need to post a signup form and for some reason cannot access any of the platforms described above, get in touch with our team and we'll help you find a solution.
Using your domain in your mailer's email address
If you want your mailer to send messages from an email address set up on your website's domain (like name@yourwebsite.com), then first follow these instructions to sync your email account to your Winnable website's domain. Then come back to this step to sync your mailer.
Up Next: Syncing submissions
Once you have a mailer platform to manage your email lists, you're ready to create a signup form. You'll create this in Winnable with settings activated so that the contact information submitted to your signup form will automatically sync to your designated mailer. So your email subscriber list will automatically grow with each new form submission.
Winnable will pass along your signup submissions, but it’s up to you to create and send email blasts in your platform of choice. You can send updates about your campaign or progress to goal, request donations, or communicate volunteer opportunities.
Once you’ve decided where you want to house your email signups, locate the relevant login credentials and proceed to the next article.
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