Before you send out your first Cooler Email blast, you'll have to setup at least one list of contacts, and configure it and your system appropriately. After that, we can work on sending out your first blast, which will be covered in Pt. 3 of this blog series.
I. Setting Up A List
a. Creating Your List
b. Configuring Your List
II. Managing Contacts
a. Importing Existing Contacts From Another System or File
b. Adding Contacts Individually
c. HQ's Membership List Download Tool
d. How Contacts Are Stored In The System
e. The CRM (Contact Relationship Manager)
f. Web Signup Form
III. Next... Part 3
I. Setting Up A List
You can have multiple lists for your chapter. For instance, you may have one list for your confirmed members and another that includes everybody. Keep in mind in many cases multiple lists may mean more maintenance and management, and having just one list works for most chapters. But it's up to you.
Ia. Creating Your List
Login to Cooler. You'll be in the Control Panel by default.
Hit "New List". It's near the top left.
We'll fill out the basic information about this list. There are three columns of information that Cooler presents to you; we'll only concern ourselves with the first column. You may look at the others and change the default setup if you like, but the first is all that I want to talk about right now. Certain important configurations can be made only after, not while, you create the list, so please do not ignore that part of the process. I agree that it is a deficiency to make you go thru extra steps, but there it is.
For the name of the list, please use a 3-4 letter capitalized prefix at the beginning of its name. If you have a training with me, I'll typically suggest something to use or we can come up with something. For instance, "SMC" for San Mateo, "SFL" for South Florida, "OFG" for Ocean Friendly Gardens. The reason I ask for this is so I have an easier and quicker time managing things (and giving support).Note, the list name cannot change, so make sure you name it appropriately so you can understand it. If we ever do need to change the list name, we can create a new list and import all the old contacts, but we won't be able to import sending and tracking history for editions on that old list.
Even tho we are not sending anything yet, Cooler requires at least one edition per list, so give your first edition a name. You can call it "Dummy" or "Test" or anything... edition names CAN change, as opposed to the list name, which can't.
When it comes to edition names, the only way Cooler displays these is alphabetically, so a good practice is to name things by date. For instance
2009 10 10 Gala Invite
2009 09 25 City Council Meeting
2009 09 19 Chapter Meeting
The "Brief Description Of List" is the wording that appears on the Profile Update page for your recipient. The Profile Update page is where recipients go when they click on the footer for ANY email sent by Surfrider chapters. If you're not sure what I mean here, next time you get an email from Surfrider sent via Cooler Email, go to the bottom of that email and note where it prompts you to click to update your profile information (unsubscribe, take yourself off the list, etc.) This is the footer that appears at the bottom of every email sent by Cooler automatically, to give recipients control over their subscriptions.
All the Surfrider lists appear here. If you do not fill out the "Brief Description Of List", the wording that appears will be the typically cryptic actual name of the list. That is, instead of "Cocoa Beach, Florida" it'll say "COCOMain01", etc.The list type, "Public", "Private", or "Hidden", should be set to "Public" in almost all cases. A "Private" list cannot be subscribed to by the public. A "Hidden" list is even more restrictive in that a recipeint can't even tell that they belong to this type of list. Never use a Hidden list. This is only appropriate for companies with employees, or one shots, etc. Hidden lists violate an agreement with Cooler and our subscribers that they have the right to unsubscribe at anytime. Hidden lists may have a place in the world of email communications, but not for Surfrider chapters!
Ib. Configuring Your List
After you create and save your list, Cooler will place you back into the Control Panel. For the list, hit "Settings". Again, lots of options, lots of sections. We'll focus on the most important here.
In the top left, fill out all the "Contact Information". This is about your chapter. The "Contact From" email address should be something officially Surfrider, either your chapter's surfrider.org email address or something with the domain of your specific chapter (ex. surfridersd.org). NOT the personal email address of the volunteer performing the blast. (If you need a surfrider.org email for your chapter, contact Ed Mazzarella or Brian Katz). You may leave the administrator's email blank if you don't want to receive reports and things from Cooler. The postal address is important for legal reasons, and can be your chapter's address or Surfrider Global's (942 Calle Negocio Suite 350, San Clemente, CA 92673).
In the "Send To A Friend" section, there's a default message "Take A Look At This Email!" that comes with it. My personal preference is to remove (or change) this message and I just point that out because it's easy to miss.
The color, logo, and banner options are those which will serve as defaults for the design of all editions created under this list. They're defaults only... they can be changed (and don't need to be set at all, necessarily).
II. Managing Contacts
You manage contacts by hitting the "Contacts" button for the list, in the Control Panel, or, in a more advanced way, by going to the "CRM" tab.
IIa. Importing Existing Contacts From Another System or File
Cooler can import contacts via a file. It must be a text-based tab-delimited file. All major spreadsheet programs (Excel, Calc, etc.) can export into this format. All this format means is that, in a simple text file, each contact has a row and each field for that contact is separated by a tab. (The abbreviation for this type of file is TSV, tab separated value, or CSV, character separated value. CSV can be confused with Comma separated values!) You can open up a TSV in any spreadsheet program like Excel, but also in any text application like Notepad, and it just looks something like
myemail@here.com Bill Smith
anotheremail@there.com Jenny Jones
boyisthiseasy@barrio.com Manuel Ramos
Note that you may import contacts at any time... when you create your list and throughout its lifetime. Cooler Email gracefully prevents duplicates, and also prevents repeat uploads from wiping out previous statii, such as an unsubscribe request. You need not do the work of checking lists for this type of thing before import.
To import, go to "Contacts", then hit "Import" at the top left. There are instructions here for the format of your file. The CRM gives you more options, but is also more complex.
I help out chapters on a regular basis getting their existing lists into the proper file format. If you need some help, don't hesitate to contact me about it.
In Excel, the process is typically to first organize your columns as Name, Company, and Email. Then "Save As", and choose the tab delimited format.
Once your file is setup, use Cooler to "Browse" for the file, and then "Import Data Now". Cooler will report on how many records were successfully imported, how many bounced, how many were already listed as unsubscribed, etc. More details on this below.
IIb. Adding Contacts Individually
Adding contacts one by one is straightforward. In the "Contacts" area for your list, there is a form at the bottom, below the existing contact list, that allows you to enter the individual contacts (And if you're wondering, having the form at the bottom of this screen is indeed somewhat of a user interface deficiency).
IIc. HQ's Membership List Download Tool
We have a tool setup on the chapternet that allows you to download your chapter's current members, in a format that you can use for importing into Cooler, or simply for your own, human use. There are several options there, and instructions. In Chapternet, it's in section #7, Internet Technologies Support.
(If you need Chapternet access, contact Ed Mazzarella.)
You can download all your members, or just those joined up since a month and year.
You'll need an extra password (besides the Chapternet password) in order to download your list. We can set this up for you anytime, and it can be the same as your Cooler Email password.
IId. How Contacts Are Stored In The System
Your Cooler Email account is a subaccount of the overall Surfrider account. Contacts are shared between subaccounts... for instance, there may be a Contact on a South Orange County list, and a San Diego list, all legitimately.
What this means is, you should never delete a Contact. If you need to remove a contact from your list, just remove them from your list.. don't delete them from the entire system. You can also set their status to "Unsubscribed" if you are sure they want to be removed from ALL lists. Typically, recipients can do this themselves via the footers in the emails (described above). But once in a while, you'll get a phone call. You can unsubscribe a contact by finding them, viewing them, editing them (this brings up the CRM), and changing their EmailFormat to "Unsubscribed".
There is more to editing a contact than just this, but I'm leaving the additional features out for simplicity's sake. Feel free to explore it.
What you should take from here is that removing a contact from a list is much different than deleting a contact. Deleting a contact removes their record entirely; removing a contact from a list just changes the record.
So another reason you do not want to delete contacts is in the case where, for instance, their status has changed to "Unsubscribed". If the contact were to be deleted, then that contact could be re-imported later, and they'd no longer be Unsubscribed. This results in bad karma! Cooler keeps track of duplicates, but not if the contact has been deleted.
The one exception for never deleting a contact is if it has "noemail.com" as part of its email address. In this case, the email address for the contact is blank or illegitimate, and so can't be used by any list, or any chapter. It's basically a bogus or erroneous record. In this case, and in this case only, you can permanently delete the contact.
The email address is the key used by the system for identification.
Cooler keeps track of duplicate emails and does not allow them... you do not have to worry about parsing lists for duplication. If you enter, via an import list or individually, a contact whose email is already in the system, Cooler will detect that and update the contact record with the new information (say the new address you are entering or a change in first name spelling). There will never be two contacts with the same email address in the system, across all the chapters.
IIe. The CRM (Contact Relationship Manager)
If you click on a contact in your list, Cooler will open that contact's record in the CRM. The CRM is a more comprehensive view of the contacts. In some cases, the CRM takes the POV of the overall system, and in some cases that of your local chapter account. I mean things like subscriber counts, and mailing list memberships. There's not a perfect logic to it, by any means... knowing this may help with some questions that come up from time to time. Perfectly justified questions, by the way.
Like several other items in this blog post, the CRM is more involved than for writing about here. So use it if you like by all means; just be careful. And like other items, if you want any assistance or training on it, I'm happy to oblige!
IIf. Web Signup Form
You can place a small form on your chapter's website to allow visitors to signup for your Cooler Email list. For instructions on this, go to the Help Section, where there is a menu item specificially for this. Whoever sets up this form should have a good grasp of HTML. While it is simple, HTML knowledge is required.
Next... Part 3
We're almost done! The next blog entry focusing on getting started with Cooler Email addresses creating the email editions themselves, sending them out, and tracking. Thank you for reading this far, and in case I haven't said it enough, I'm here for any questions, training, and help your chapter needs.
Peace and waves!
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