Hi, Curtis

 

I'm curious: how do you use this feature? What is the purpose and how often is it used? I'm just curious as not many people over the years have asked for any changes to it...Thanks.

Hi

Thank you for asking ! 

For us, almost all of our clients that use our data system also have email through us, In addition to people that use us for hosting.  So Smarter Mail Touches pretty much the bulk of our clients. (Our data system : We design software. A web based data system for non profits to manage their day to day operations)

 

When we have an issue, Server going down. scheduled maintenance, problem with our data system (down for emergency maintenance) or something else that i need to get the word out to everyone, We use this to send it out to everyone.  It is not that often, maybe a few times a month ? But when i need to send something out, it is pretty critical to get action on it within a few hours.

 

I have found that we can not rely on the management of various organizations to check their email and relay the information to the rest of their staff in a timely manner (some non profit managers i know check their email only once a day, some only a couple of times a week)  So this allows us to blast a message out to most of our clients and not have to wait as someone in the org will get it and spread the word.

 

Sometimes we need to send the same message out a few times. Like reminders. "System will be down in 4 days", "System will be down in 1 Day", "System will be down in 2 hours" So it would be nice to see who actually got and read those messages, and to have a history and be able to click on one and hit resend.

 

The Other thing this could be really useful for is to see if people are in fact checking their email. Since we pay for Smarter Mail based on user accounts, when we have orgs that might have 20 or 30 users and some of them never, ever check their email, OR ... the org has terminated someone and forgets to close out their email account, and it is just gathering spam over months and months, This could help identify email accounts that have been abandoned, so that we can ask the org to kill them off and we can reclaim the user account (license).

 

We have one org right now, the original executive director assigned email accounts for every department, every volunteer, every staff. About 30 email accounts total.  She left, and they have a new director now the past couple of years (and does not understand computers even half of what the previous ED did)  After doing a lot of digging, we discovered that only 1 of those 30 email account is actually used and active any more, and that is by their accountant. All of the rest of the email accounts have been abandoned with changes in staff, etc, and the new ED has never updated anything, and now all those accounts do is collect SPAM.  Through the mass messaging it could be a way to validate that users are in fact getting messages or not.

 

Thanks again for asking !