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

Tue Sep 15 08:44:38 PDT 2020

Hi All,

I think the conversation about saving money and aligning digital practices with group values is important, and I’d like to add some additional context.

  *   FOSS4G is a major event with a major budget, Calgary was expecting to spend ~$1M for 1,200 people
  *   Saving $75 per month sounds like a lot, but over a year that’s $900; that’s one Bronze sponsorship.
     *   That’s 0.09% of a $1M budget
  *   Is the time and effort required to research, install, migrate, manage, learn, and support a new system worth more or less than $900?
     *   Could that time be better spent seeking out a $1,000 sponsorship?
  *   Will the next FOSS4G team be able to run with the system as easily as this team?

Please consider the big picture and downstream impacts.

Cheers,
Jon

From: Conference_dev <conference_dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> On Behalf Of María Arias de Reyna
Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2020 9:09 AM
To: Adam Steer <adam.d.steer at gmail.com>; stevenfeldman <shfeldman at gmail.com>; OSGeo-Marketing <marketing at lists.osgeo.org>; conference <conference_dev at lists.osgeo.org>; osgeo-board List <board at lists.osgeo.org>; Malena Libman <malena.libman at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Conf] [Marketing] Proposal to subscribe to an email platform for all of OSGeo committees

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<mailto: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<mailto:adam.d.steer at gmail.com>> wrote:
Is there a reason the existing discussion / announce list infrastructure (including announce at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:announce at lists.osgeo.org> and foss4gXXXX at lists.osgeo.org<mailto: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<mailto: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<http://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<http://mappery.org>

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