Mailing List Management

Genealogy societies, historical societies, veterans groups, local civic and socialgroups and friends of the library often use email to keep their members informedabout meetings, special events and society news. This is a good system, except forone thing - managing the mailing list. Even a small mailing list can be achallenge to keep updated - and then there’s the delight of dealing with all thebounced messages every time you send an update. There’s got to be a better way!One very nice solution isPosterous. At ﬁrst look, Posterous appears to be just alightweight blog service. Itis that, but it’s also a lot more. With Posterous, you cancreate a free blog site complete with permanent pages to provide membershipinformation about your group. The blog itself serves as the mailing list manager, messagedistribution service and an online archive of the information sent to your members. Toadd content to the blog, you just send a message to the assigned email address createdas part of the blog setup. The subject line of your email becomes the title of the postedarticle and the contents can include hyperlinks, photos, audio, attached documents andeven video. If you’re scratching your head right now wondering what a blog has to dowith a mailing list, keep reading.Give your members the address to your Posterous blog site and they can choose tosubscribe to your updates - either as email updates or using a news reader. When a newitem is posted to the blog, it will also be sent to all your subscribers. It even keeps youout of legal trouble by providing online subscribe/unsubscribe functionality so yourorganization won’t be categorized as a spammer. Already have a mailing list? You caneasily import your list into your Posterous subscriber list.

Original email message . . .Message posted at site.

But it gets better! If you have a smart phone with a camera, you can take a photo andsend it straight to your Posterous site. You can also use Posterous to update other socialmedia platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Your single email message will automaticallyupdate each of those platforms too.Creating a Posterous blog is easy. All you do is send an email topost@posterous.com.Posterous will send you an immediate reply with the details of your blog. You can then goto the site and complete your set up. This will only take a couple of minutes.First you’ll be asked if you want to create a siteor a group. For our purposes, choose the site.Next, you’ll be asked to provide a name,description and address for your site and decidewhether it will be a public or private site. Noticethe address will always end with

posterous.com

so, in this example, the address to the site will behttp://mcohsnews.posterous.com.

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Now you are taken to the management page at Posterous. In the left column is a list of all the Posterous sites where you are either an administrator or contributor. (Note: In thisexample I have hidden several private sites I manage.) Click to select the site you want tomanage and the management screens appear in the main pane. Notice the tabs at the topof the pane to display Posts, Pages, People and Autopost work areas. Also notice that fromhere you can use the Post by web button to add an article through the Web interface.Probably the ﬁrst thing you’ll want to do is choose an appropriate design theme for yourblog. This impacts what people will see when they visit the blog online, but not the emailmessages forwarded to subscribers. Click the

Theme my site

item in the Actions section tochoose from a nice selection of themes.

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