Email

Email is still the most popular and universal form of communication for clubs, with local Party rules mandating notice for meetings to be sent by email. Social media messaging systems have gained in popularity — but their proprietary nature is often exclusive.

Beehiiv

⁠

Beehiiv⁠

is a newsletter-first operating system for clubs. They have a free tier, and powerful tools for segmenting and analyzing your posts.

Gmail

Many clubs start off using

Gmail⁠

for sending messages to their members, using a shared Gmail account. This can work fine to get started, but can run into some limitations as the number of members grow, and some emails don't get delivered or bounce back, and it's often hard to determine why. When using standard Gmail for a newsletter it's not possible to know if an email was received and if/when it was opened.

There are numerous extensions for Gmail that do provide additional functionality for sending newsletters, one of the most popular is

Yet Another Mail Merge⁠

To support a custom domain name you need to purchase (at least one) G-Suite account that costs $50/year.

Substack

Intended for writers who want to charge for a monthly newsletter,

Substack⁠

provides free access for newsletters that remain free. Although more limited in functionality than MailChimp, it is easy to use, and provides all of the basic functionality required by clubs. It also provides an easily searchable archive of communications e.g.

Demclubs⁠

uses Substack for their monthly newsletter.

Wordpress

A basic

Wordpress⁠

account supports forwarding emails for 5 users — so you can forward emails sent to president@ or treasurer@ to your club officers. You can also setup info@ to forward to more than one club officer, so inquiries are never missed.

Zeffy

If you’re using

Zeffy⁠

to accept payments and manage your membership — you can also use it to send emails to just your members, as opposed to a wider email distribution.

Zoho

Although not as well known as Gmail,

Zoho Mail⁠

offers powerful email functioanlity without adverts. Their Freemium model starts with 5 free accounts, and supports custom domain names. Five is often enough for most clubs, allowing each officer to have their own account along with one general or info@ account.

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