[Board] [Marketing] Proposal to subscribe to an email platform for all of OSGeo committees

Tue Sep 15 08:09:17 PDT 2020

Resending because I lost some lists here.

Should we focus on only one list? Marketing maybe?

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 5:00 PM María Arias de Reyna <delawen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Jumping in!
>
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 3:22 PM Adam Steer <adam.d.steer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there a reason the existing discussion / announce list infrastructure
>> (including announce at lists.osgeo.org and foss4gXXXX at lists.osgeo.org)
>> cannot be used? (are there numbers on how much that costs?)
>>
>
> Having a better marketing tracking statistics tool.
>
>
>> If we're talking about building infrastructure, is it a good time to talk
>> about wholesale migration for all of OSGeo lists to more modern systems (eg
>> mailman v3 or discourse, or ...)? - using F4G 2021 as the guinea pig?
>>
>
> There are open source mailchimp alternatives. I think I mentioned
> https://www.phplist.com/ before. As long as we have a mail server
> available to  send the emails... do we?
>
> Current FOSS4G team lacks the workforce to add an open source code
> alternative to mailchimp to the stack. We are focusing on Pretix and
> Pretalx at this point, which we hope will be useful as a base event OSGeo
> stack.
>
> But if there's some volunteer that can look into phplist and deploy it,
> please, be my guest!!! We just don't want to add more tasks on our
> shoulders at this moment. Although the final decision should go through
> conference and marketing committees I guess.
>
>
>> Is sharing mailing lists ethical/permitted? My argument here is that when
>> a subscriber signs up they should be allowed to give (or not) permission
>> about how (and by whom) they are contacted in future - in the example a
>> user signs up for FOSS4G2021 communications, we should not (even if it is
>> allowed by law) then share their details in future with some other event
>> *without explicit permission to do so* (do we know for sure that those
>> 10-15k contacts signed up for future communications about conferences?)
>>
>
> As far as I know (maybe some LOC slipped), we always have phrased it as
> "if you want to keep updated on future FOSS4G". And there's no automatic
> adding to this list when you buy a ticket. Attendees who bought a ticket
> and people interested in FOSS4G in general are separated lists. And there's
> always a link to remove yourself from the list. So no problem here with
> privacy.
>
>
>> ...and what is the purpose for tracking e-mail? do we explain what is
>> tracked and why anywhere? are there examples for people to see? are
>> subscribers plainly made aware that mail to them is tracked?
>>
>> With sendy I see some similarities to mailchimp in that regard,
>> collecting a bunch of stuff for the aim of... is anybody sure?
>>
>
> Long story short is: being able to do better marketing to sell more
> tickets. Collect statistics to understand the kind of things people read
> more.
>
> I agree, this may be interesting to discuss if we *need* it or if we are
> happy with less statistics and more blind sales. I am no
> mailchimp/marketing expert so I can only guess here.
>
>
>> I know there's likely some pressure to get messages going out for
>> FOSS4G2021, it'd be great to see it done with awesome data privacy
>> practices and open tooling in mind :)
>>
>
> We have the current mailchimp we can spin up whenever we need. But if we
> are going to move to Sendy and be "guinea pigs", it is better to do it
> before we start using mailchimp (and adding templates there). Just to not
> have to migrate/duplicate work.
>
>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Adam
>>
>
> Cheers!
> María
>
>
>>
>> On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 at 14:47, Steven Feldman <shfeldman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I have been talking with Malena about a replacement for our MailChimp
>>> account for FOSS4G.
>>>
>>> Our current subscription is paused as it was costing us about $100 per
>>> month for 10-15k contacts even though we weren’t sending emails, we can
>>> restart the account whenever we need to and start paying the bill again.
>>>
>>> We have been looking at lower cost ways to send bulk emails to potential
>>> delegates for FOSS4G and based on some recommendations and reviews we think
>>> Sendy.co would work for us. If anyone has experience of Sendy please
>>> chip in now with your views. There is a one time cost of $59 for a Sendy
>>> license which we would need to install on our own server and then a cost of
>>> $1 per 10k emails for the Amazon SE
>>> <https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/>S mail service plus a bit more for
>>> attachments.
>>>
>>> If we sent up to 100k emails per month (10 campaigns to 10k contacts)
>>> with a few graphics our costs would be about $25 per month which is a
>>> fraction of the costs with MailChimp.
>>>
>>> I propose that OSGeo purchases a Sendy license, sets up the self hosted
>>> service on our infrastructure and signs up for the Amazon Simple Email
>>> Service. We should set this up in a way that allows our Marketing
>>> Committee, Regional FOSS4Gs and other groups to have access to the service
>>> for managing and sharing (with appropriate privacy controls) mailing lists.
>>> This would provide continuity from year to year for our events organisers
>>> and could also form the basis for an ongoing dialogue with sponsors
>>>
>>> Malena and Maria are keen to move our contacts out of MailChimp and to
>>> get started mailing people re FOSS4G2021 as soon as possible.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> ______
>>> Steven
>>>
>>> Unusual maps in strange places -  mappery.org
>>>
>>> Subscribe to my weekly “Maps in the Wild <http://eepurl.com/dKStT-/>”
>>> newsletter
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Marketing mailing list
>>> Marketing at lists.osgeo.org
>>> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
>>
>>
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