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Newsletter, August 2005

By Karen Graham, Client Development Manager

Nonprofit Neighborhood

We're nuts about these new clients

Harvey Levinson for Hempstead Town Supervisor - Mr. Levinson is running a close race in a Republican-dominated area of New York State.  To win, he will use thedatabank to help manage online and offline fundraising, field activities, direct mail and email.

Center for Democracy and Citizenship  - The Center for Democracy and Citizenship develops citizenship initiatives around the concept of public work, and is part of the Hubert H Humphrey institute for Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.  They will use thedatabank for contact management, fundraising, and publishing their email newsletter.

Staff Party August 14th

thedatabank employees and our partners celebrated our 7th year last Sunday.  The event featured food, a Doberman agility demonstration, food, challenging math exercises, food, reminiscing, and food.  Click here for photos from the event.

Tip du Jour

Email an attachment - without going nuts

PowerMail and thedatabank's standard email tool are great for sending bulk messages.  You can personalize each message, unsubscribed addresses are automatically removed from the list, and bad email addresses are flagged for future reference.  But thedatabank does not allow attachments.

Here are a few reasons why we don't allow attachments in bulk emails: 

• Efficiency: Attachments take extra time to send.  A copy of each attachment needs to be sent out with each message, potentially increasing the total size of the message by many times, and that could significantly slow down the sending of your batch. 
• Deliverability: Since an attachment increases the total size of the message, it is more likely to put the recipient "over quota" with their ISP and not be delivered at all.  Or, if delivered, it may prevent the delivery of subsequent messages to the recipient. 
• Compatibility: Attachments may not be compatible with all recipients' systems.  If you are using Windows and send attachments to Macintosh users, or vice versa, the recipient may have trouble opening or viewing the attachment because the recipient doesn't have a compatible application.  If the attachment is compressed with a program such as WinZip or Stuffit, the recipient must have a compatible program installed to uncompress it.  If the original file is generated on a Mac, its name can be a problem if it is missing the three-letter extension required by Windows. 
• Security: Attachments are sometimes removed from messages by ISPs for security reasons, or not shown to recipients by their mail program.  Email attachments are the primary vehicle for spreading viruses, so attachments are generally viewed with suspicion by email programs, users, and ISPs.

Here's an alternative way to send an email with an attachment , while still using the email addresses stored in thedatabank.

Let's say you want to send an email to your board of directors, reminding them of an upcoming meeting, and you want to include a copy of the meeting agenda as an attachment. 

• Search thedatabank for your board members. 
• Create a Roster listing ONLY their email addresses (no names, member IDs, etc).  Output your roster as a Tab-delimited Text File. 
• In another window, open Outlook or the email program of your choice, write your message, and attach the agenda.  
• Then, simply copy the email addresses from the text file and paste them into the address line of your message.
• You're ready to send!

Thanks to Nicole at the North Carolina Housing Coalition for raising this question.

Karen's Blog

Some thoughts on walnuts

There is a beautiful, ill-mannered walnut tree in my backyard. Grass struggles under its shade, and the lilac is all but dead from the walnut's acidity.  In fall, unlike other trees that drop single leaves, my walnut drops long fronds that resist the mower and poke holes in the lawn bags. 

The tree only has one friend: an equally ill-mannered red squirrel that claims the entire vicinity as its territory.  In August, when the nuts are ripe, the Red Menace is in a constant state of alert, prepared to drive out any intruder.  I've seen it attack grey squirrels twice its size.  Ironically, I have never seen it actually eat a walnut.  So everyone is going hungry.

I have seen what amounts to a similar situation in many nonprofit organizations.  Often there is one person who knows how to use the ancient, complicated database, and everyone else is at that person's mercy for pulling lists and reports.  In this case, the real menace is the software, not the unlucky person who happens to be the resident expert.  Why not invest in a database that is accessible to everyone, and easy enough for any employee to use?

That's exactly what the St. Paul Area Council of Churches decided to do.  I had the pleasure, last Friday, of training some employees to use thedatabank as a shared contact management system.  This was a big change for them, but they were receptive and fast learners.

Since thedatabank is flexible enough to manage many different types of constituent relationships, from donors to the vendors who receive your newsletter, it's ideal for use as an organization-wide data management tool.  If you're not already sharing it with other departments, contact us about how we might facilitate this.  You'd be nuts not to.

Karen

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