Cooler Email: The Basics Pt. 1: What It Is (And Isn't)

Heard about Cooler Email? Just started volunteering for the Surfrider Foundation? Been tasked with communicating with your public about your chapter's issues, events, and happenings? Cooler Email is a tool and online service that the Surfrider Foundation has contracted with for FREE use by our chapters. This is a very basic rundown of what it is designed to do, and what it is NOT!

Part 2 and Part 3 go into the basics of Getting Started, and Sending Your First Blast.

Cooler Email IS:

• for sending out "one to many" email messages from a chapter to the public.
  
• an active way to increase the read rates of your email messages and decrease the chance that they get filtered out due to spam trapping.
• a tracker for seeing how well your communications are being received, via graphs, statistics, and reports.
• capable of importing email lists from other applications (ex. Yahoo, Outlook, etc.), some of which you may currently be using (inefficiently!) for email communications.
• capable of integration on your chapter's website via a signup form, which can be stylized however you like.
• capable of managing and gracefully handling bounces, unsubscribers, and duplicates.
• capable of sending out any email that you can design and that modern email technology can handle.
• a provider of basic design templates for your emails.
  
• free for your chapter, no matter how many emails you send.
  

Cooler Email IS NOT:

• an email program. It's not a replacement for Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, Thunderbird, Surfrider.org webmail, etc. You should continue to actually read and write standard emails via the program of your choice.
• an email address, or a provider of an email address. If you need a surfrider.org chapter address, please contact the writer of this blog, your chapter's regional coordinator, or Ed Mazzarella (director of chapters).
• An activist listserv. It is not for ongoing back and forth communications . It is not specifically designed for generating discussions.
• for sending out emails containing more than basic information, instructions, or explanations... tho it can be used for alerting and linking to webpages that may contain more comprehensive information.
• perfect, but can do most of what you need with some learning and training, and training from Surfrider is always available.

Two Quick Ways To Edit Email Images (1 for Mac, 1 for PC)

Inserting images into emails requires, in almost all cases, that the images satisfy some sort of limitation on their width and height. Especially the width! Sometimes you'll have an email template which requires that they are a specific number of pixels wide, or perhaps a maximum number of pixels. Even without restrictions, say when you are just creating an email message from scratch, we typically don't want to have the message be too wide. After all people will be viewing email in a number of formats... a web browser, an iphone, various email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

One way to increase the odds that as many people as possible view the message correctly is to have compact, reasonably sized images in your emails, and to control those sizes yourself! Don't leave it to chance, like leaving it to the user's application.

So you may need to resize and/or crop your images before composing your emails. In some cases a simple resize will be all you need, but maybe you have a big image from your camera, that, instead of or in addition to resizing, you want to crop. (Cropping means using only part of the image). Here's how to Resize and Crop for two platforms: 1) Mac, 2) PC.

FOR THE MAC
Modern Macs (OS X) come with Preview.

If you're a regular Mac user, you know this application. It's the default app for opening up PDF files, and many image formats like JPEG. But Preview can also be used for editing images. So open up your image in Preview.

Customize your toolbar to show the editing tools.

You'll want to have at least the Crop and Select buttons added. (Resize is not an element on the toolbar, but the menu.)

To crop, hit Select, and then make your rectangle of your chosen size and placement. Then hit Crop!

To resize, go to Tools->Adjust Size. Select the dimensions you want. You can do this for the original image or a cropped image. Also, you can keep the ratio of the dimensions of your original image ("Scale proportionally" - almost always the best option), or change them so there's a "stretch" to one of the sides. The lock linking the width and height reflects the "Scale proportionally" checkbox.

You can choose to Resample the image or not... a lower sample reflects a lower filesize, which is preferred until it gets to the point where the image doesn't look good anymore. Space is limited with Cooler Email, but we don't want you to sacrifice quality.

Remember to "Save As..." if you want the new image to be a separate file, and simply to "Save" the file if you want to replace the original.

FOR THE PC
For the PC I use a software program called Faststone Image Viewer, which is free (but you can donate if you like!). Tim Tringali of the South Florida chapter first introduced me to this. Download it at http://www.faststone.org.

Faststone is great for navigating thru images on your PC. Once you find the one you want to edit, a double click on it opens it up in full screen mode; then a right click on the image brings up the menu which will lead to "Edit", which leads to the features we're talking about here.

To crop, choose "Crop Board".

You can immediately save this cropped image to a file via the "Lossless Crop To File" button, or, if you want to pull this temporary image into another application, "Crop To Clipboard".

To resize, choose "Resize/Resample".

In almost all cases, you'll want to keep the "Preserve Aspect Ratio" checkbox selected; otherwise you'll get a stretch on one side of the pic that will look unnatural (for real photos).

Remember to "Save As..." if you want the new image to be a separate file, and simply to "Save" the file if you want to replace the original.

How To Export Lists From Cooler Email

For many chapters, your main Cooler Email list may have been derived simply by importing your latest membership list from Chapternet. But if you have a webform tied to that list, or if chapter volunteers have been manually adding to it, there will be more contacts than are in the Surfrider National database, and you may very well want to export or download that list (or lists) from Cooler Email. Here's how to do it.

The basic steps, which will be expanded upon below, are:

1. Login to Cooler Email.
2. Figure out which list you want to export (your chapter may very well have only one list).
3. Click "Contacts".
4. Click "Export".
5. In the "Email List Export Manager", (de-)select the fields you do and don't want to grab.
6. Click "Export Now".
7. Save your file.

Pretty simple! The only real stumbling block is that the Email List Export Manager defaults, somewhat haphazardly, to selecting a whole lot of fields that the vast majority of us do not need, the vast majority of the time.

1. Login to Cooler Email.
If you don't have a Cooler Email login, contact Katz.

2. Figure out which list you want to export (there may very well be only one list).
3. Click "Contacts".

4. Click "Export".

5. In the "Email List Export Manager", (de-)select the fields you do and don't want to grab.
Don't ask me what logic went into the decision to default certain fields here as checked! This wouldn't be a big issue except that if you only want some of these fields, there's no way to de-select all of them in one shot. You have to manually go thru and de-click (or click) the ones you don't (or do) want to export in your file.

Something else to keep in mind: several of these fields will likely have blank, or even incorrect data. Things like "SpouseFirst" and "Industries" are rarely used.

I would also de-check "Include Stats" if you are using this for anything other than specifically seeing how your email blasts have been doing. In the case where you really do want to see that, A-OK, but if not, it's a lot of clutter.

(Note: on Windows, I believe you can de-check these lists without using your mouse/trackpad by using the tab keys and spacebar keys).

6. Click "Export Now".
7. Save your file.

That's it! The only thing to say about Saving the File is that it's a pretty fast download in many cases and depending on your browser configuration, you may not even know that it's worked... you may suspect it is not working at all! Check your desktop... there may be a new file there. You can open this file in a spreadsheet application (or a text editor).