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

[Adam Steer]

hi folks (restricting response to the list I have permission to post on)

It is great to see a move away from mailchimp - which for me is less about
money and more about knowing what subscriber data are retained and used
(and being able to properly describe it to users/subscribers).

I have some questions:

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?)

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?

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?)

...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?

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 :)

Regards,

Adam


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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/marketing/attachments/20200915/dfaf29d9/attachment.html>