Mailing List
Prior to 2008, the email distribution list was maintained as an address book contact in Gmail. Gmail supports putting in a list of email addresses for a single contact, but such a feature was designed more for small groups, like a work group or a family group. Gmail would block sending an email out with more than 300 contacts in a single field (to:, cc:, or bcc:). So, when the SingaporeConnect mailing list grew beyond 300 members, the sender would have to split up the send into multiple emails, making sure to only copy and paste in the relevant set of contacts. This work was manual and tedious. Furthermore, sending emails in this fashion exposes the risk of accidentally pasting the list of contacts into the to: or cc: fields, then making the entire list public to all recipients, a waste of space and an issue of privacy.
Therefore, in 2009, we made a transition to Google Groups. Google Groups was used to maintain an email distribution list for sending mass emails to all members. As an added benefit, it preserved an archive of messages online, making it possible for potential members to look through these emails to see if joining the group would be to their interest. However, some members mentioned they did not receive emails they should have received and re-requested to be added. However, they were already in the list. Some members said they received emails sporadically. In some cases the member was deleted and re-added, and then they started receiving emails. We even created a test account to verify that emails were being received, and did notice that not 100% of emails sent out were distributed to the test account, but could not identify a pattern. We never resolved why they were not receiving the emails and this was a perennial annoyance.
It is a big effort to move to a new mailing list. In theory one can take a list of addresses and move them over to another mailing list, but in practice, many service providers would prefer or require that all emails added to the list, are approved by the respondents. This prevents them from being used to send spam.
Because of the big effort, when deciding to migrate to a more reliable mailing list, we would want to pick a new mailing list that we are sure will work and will be an integral part of our web site.
Web Site
SingaporeConnect has long looked for a reasonably low-maintenance multiple-user-editable web site with features like forums, news feeds, event registration, and photos.
Some of these functions have been handled by a variety of external web sites:
Event Registration
- Evite. Evite is great in that it has nice templates and can be used to send emails to recipients directly, who when responding to a simple "yes/no" type button, will add or remove themselves from the "evite". Evite also had a feature to create a direct link to the registration page to let anyone enter the link and register directly, without having to sign-up as an evite user. There were three reasons to go away from Evite. One, Evite requires the email addresses to be provided to them. This is manual work requiring an extraction of addresses from Google Groups to send to Evite. Two, Evite takes ownership of sending the emails out, to all people who have been invited. People who did not respond to the evite still got reminders to "go respond". This was annoying to some people who subsequently requested to be removed from the list, but even when they were, still got those reminders, because Evite had the original "list". Three, Evite changed their web site to a new style that removed the feature to create a direct link. Apparently they want all email addresses to be provided to them, presumably so they can encourage recipients of events to use Evite to create further events.
- Eventbrite. Eventbrite is awesome. It has improved very much over time. It doesn't have extremely user-configurable templates, but it provides an incredible degree of customisation for things like ticket sales (number of tickets, when to start/end sales), questions ("Would you prefer a vegeterian meal?"), payment types (Eventbrite internal, Google Checkout, or Paypal), reports (creating custom reports of fields to be extracted, seeing in table or chart form), analysis (looking at clicks, sales over time, over location), exports (to Excel), cancellation/refund setup (fairly automated), and being able to have all of this in one place. However, Eventbrite is expensive. It costs about $1/ticket when selling on Eventbrite, on top of the Paypal or Google Checkout fees ($0.30 + 2.9%). So for many of the paid events which we used Eventbrite for registration, SingaporeConnect made a loss after accounting for Eventbrite fees.
- E-Commerce shopping type sites. This was used for a couple of events. The advantage is the only fees are the Paypal fees. The disadvantage is the "basic" (meaning, "free") version of these sites don't have the ability to set a maximum number of sales of a ticket, nor a start/stop date. They are after all designed for selling things like "handbags" where you assume there is always "enough stock". Also, there is none of the reporting, questions, refund, features that Eventbrite has.
- Facebook. Where possible, events are published on our closed group on Facebook. Facebook is good in that it reaches out to a lot of people who use Facebook on a regular basis (meaning, they log into Facebook as often as they read email). However, the Facebook event sign-up is limited to "Are you attending Yes/No/Maybe". There is no follow-up mechanism for payment. As a result, we found very low correlation between sign-ups on Facebook and actual attendence. It appears most people use the "Yes" mechanism to insert a note on their Facebook page so they are reminded about an event they have signed up for as the date nears. As Facebook is well-used by a lot of people, we will still continue to use Facebook to publicise events.
Photos
- Possibly for a brief period, photos were published on Picasa. However, after the Facebook group was created, we decided to use Facebook to create events and then publish photos to those events. Then Facebook changed their setup, such that Past Events were de-emphasised and also the photos associated with them became hard to find, and then, they just disappeared. One could still create albums and publish them to Facebook, but not link them to the event.
- The advantage with Facebook photos of course is they are very sharable, "likable", and even, possibly, "taggable". The other reason we wanted to use Facebook at first was it gave us a way to restrict access to these photos to only members in our Facebook group (it is a Closed group, so only members can look at the content within it).
- Another advantage is members can also create albums and contribute photos to our group. The disadvantage is it is not obvious whether one should create an album on a personal page and link it, or add the photo directly to the group page (but without organising it into folders and albums, it soon gets to be too many photos mixed together), or create an album on the Facebook page directly.
Forums
- Forums were first held using Ning, which, if some recall, tried to be a "private social networking site for your organisation". They didn't see a lot of activity and frankly, we don't think our members in general are going to be very active on forums.
- Having interacted with them in past events, we think one useful purpose for the forums is around the favourite Singaporean pastime: discussing good restaurants and good recipes.
Content
- Over time, SingaporeConnect has amassed some static content that might be nice to keep up as a reference - instead of emailing out every now and then. This includes a list of past events, our mission, and such. Google Groups actually provided a mechanism for storing files and publishing them, but in their recent revamp, removed that functionality.
Member Database
- The membership database was actually first done using LinkedIn, which was actually touted by SingaporeConnect back then to be what appeared to be a trust-worthy site for entering your personal data and also using it as a way to "connect" to others in the Bay Area. SingaporeConnect used to be a "group" of sorts on LinkedIn, such as LinkedIn today allows one to be associated with a company.
- When we shifted to Google Groups, a deficiency is it doesn't allow for any additional "fields" to be stored about a member. Even the welcome question that is asked, is not stored, after the member is approved for addition.
Surveys
- Surveys were done using Surveymonkey, and, for a brief period, Surveylicious. Both are decent products.
Looking for a Community web site
SingaporeConnect has looked over the past two years for a "portal"-type site. There are some high-end products which are great, but very, very, expensive, basically used by the likes of large organisations like The Red Cross. There are some blogging-type products which can be enhanced with widgets and plug-ins to have the features of a community web site, but "some DIY is required". There is of course always the concern that trying to integrate everything into one web site rather than using a hodge-podge of external web sites, is like trying to find perfection. Then again, maintaining a hodge-podge of web site is also harder not just for the administrator but when transitioning to a new team.
In a recent discussion with members, some told us that they would like to hold events, but do not know how to start. This was the "straw" that led us to finally decide to find a place to put all the institutional knowledge we have on events into a web site, and combine it together with a web site that has the features we can be comfortable with integrating all the functions above into. Coincidentally, at around the same time, a web search for such "Community web sites" led to Groupspaces.
Benefits of Groupspaces
| Feature | Advantage |
|---|
| Member Database | Can ask custom fields during member registration, and link members to features on the web site |
| Event Registration | Can tie event registration sign-ups to members, offer control over member/non-member rate verification, still have ability to ask custom questions, cheaper event registration fees than Eventbrite. |
| Web site | Can keep a clean, branded-identity, for web pages containing SingaporeConnect information and history. |
| Photos | Space for putting up all our past event photos. Both members and administrators can publish photo albums. |
| Event Calendar | Both upcoming and past events can be viewed in a calendar or agenda view. |
| Event Creation | Members, not just administrators, can create events. |
| Forum | Forum, tied to member database (to block spam), can be used for discussion of interesting topics |
| Donation | Although SingaporeConnect is currently free to join, there is an extensive set of features to permit paid membership, donations, selling of items, and properly tying this to members. We see this avenue as a useful feature to have when the time justifies. |
| | |
Disadvantage
- You'll have another sign-in to manage, as chances are you probably aren't on a Groupspaces site already (but if you are, then you won't have to!)
- We do want to keep our photos off the public Internet still, though, as we think some members are more comfortable if they can access photos of themselves at past events, without knowing that they are all very easily accessible.
Comments?
Start a topic on our forum, or email back via the "Contact Us" link, to let us know what your preferences and suggestions are. We hope you will find the effort we have put into this web site, requiring your re-registration, a worthwhile improvement to your experience as a SingaporeConnect member!
