[last updated 1/21/00]

All Email programs make it very easy for you to send an identical piece of electronic mail to a large list of recipients. Of course, you probably don't want to do this to often. You don't want to get people upset, or get accused of "spamming." So, since this is something you will probably do infrequently, it makes sense to get the most bang for the buck.

A natural way to do that is to personalize your email letters. This is something that you can't do with most email programs, but there is software available that will let you do it.

To give you the idea of what we're talking about, let's take the example of a local neighborhood association holding its annual dinner.

Assume that your group has been diligent about collecting email addresses at your monthly meetings and on the petitions that you've circulated against shopping mall expansion. And you've found a volunteer who can keep up with data entry. So now your database of 600 residents includes 200 e-mail addresses of your members and prospective new members.

Your database (which is based on Filemaker) allows you to easily omit the 400 records that contain no email address. After you do that, you export the 200 remaining records to a text file: each line in this file will contain the information on one person, with fields separated by commas or tabs. What you end up with is called your data file, and it ends up looking something like this (using Simpletext on a Mac, in Notepad on a Windows machine, or in Edit on a DOS PC):

John, Brown, 23 Witmore Ct., Hooverville, MI, 45231, 994-4412, jbrow222@aol.com
Mary, Francis, 29 Witmore Ct., Hooverville, MI, 45231, 994-1219, mfwild@hotmail.com

Now you are ready to write a notice that is sure to get the attention of both John Brown and Mary Francis. Here's what the notice, also called the merge letter, will look like.

Dear <first>:

In two weeks we are going to send you an invitation to the annual
Hooverville Neigborhood Association Spaghetti Dinner. We are
writing you to make sure that we have your correct info. Is your
phone number still <phone>, and are you still at this address:

<address1>
<address2>
<city>, <state> <zip>

If not, please let us know the correct information so that we can
get the invitation to you on time.

Thank you very much. And we look forward to seeing you if you
can come to the dinner on Oct. 26th!

Sincerely,

Jane Hoover
Annual Dinner Co-Chair

P.S. If you know anyone else who might want to attend the dinner,
could you please send us their name, address and email?

Then, wait 48 hours and you will begin to see some benefits. Besides the fact that you generated some excitement for your fundraiser:

• It didn't cost you anything. In fact, you found 5 bad US mail addresses and 10 people who didn't want invitations, saving you $4.95 in postage alone.
• People sent you 20 new names of people to invite to the dinner, expanding the potential revenues you will gain from your fundraiser.
• You noticed that 30 people had defunct e-mail address, so you were able to clean those out of your database.

The only potential negative effect of using email is that you will do a much better job of recruiting "technology haves" to your event; you might lose people on the other side of the "digital divide." So you might want to find ways to do extra outreach to the 400 people without email. Some organizations have even gone so far as to pick "e-captains" for a street or a city block. The idea is to send your email to 60 captains, each of whom is responsible for bringing about 10 other people to your annual event.

There are several pieces of software that can be used for electronic mailmerges. (Reportedly, Microsoft even has a add-on module for Windows 2000 with this capability.) The software we recommend right now is fairly low-tech, meaning that it runs on fairly old computers and doesn't take too long to download. The programs are:

FletMail for Windows95 and Windows98 (it is free)
eMerge for the Macintosh (restricted version is free, $99.95 to unlock all features)

Each program comes with instructions on how to set up your data file and your merge letter. Just be careful; always do a test run on a small list. You don't want to send out a personalized letter to John Brown's email address, addressed to Mary Francis!

If you have suggestions on improving this tip, write us at techtip @ organizenow.net .

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