Support

Our club's major focus each year is an event involving 2500 registrants with a budget well into six figures.  It takes about 300 members to work the event and club members are not allowed to participate - they have to work.

 I have the email addresses from the last year's entrants and our only form of advertising is one reminder email to each of last year's registrants.  In order to send the blast emails, I loaded all of last year's entrants on the system as members but with all privileges (except emails) turned off.  Every few days I've been sending email blasts to 500 or so of last year's entrants reminding them of the event.

But this is a complicated process.  Since I do not want to send reminders to folk who have already registered I have to:

1. Export the addresses of the folk I want to send emails to
2. Export all current event registrants
3. Remove addressees who are already registrants
4. Import list of addressees who have not yet registered
5. Blast email to modified email list.

This is a complex tedious task.  Even at this level, it is not ideal since all of last year's attendees are on the database as members and are prompted to log in when they attempt to register.  This confuses them since they have no idea they are members and do not know how to login. 

Also, I cannot do a bulk delete of the non-member's names since if I do that I'll also remove the event registration data for those email addresses who are also registered.

 One solution would be to establish a new membership class.  For the purpose of this discussion I'll call this an 'ASSOCIATE' member.

This new ASSOCIATE class would: 

1. Would be only visible to the administrator.
2. Have no login privileges.
   
3. Would be searchable by the advanced search tool
   
4. It would be possible to SEND blast email to ASSOCIATES.
5. ASSOCIATE's records would contain the event number of all events they are signed up for.
6. Can be deleted by re-importing the data with a 'delete me' option turned on.
7. Have a "Note" field where I can record details about this person such as "Reminder sent 2/9".
   

Then when I want to do an email blast for an event I do an advanced search for all associate members who are not registered for event xx. 

Of course you run a danger here of having people like me importing large of ASSOCIATES as archived members and WA deriving no revenue from them.  As a precaution against this you could establish a rule that there may not be more ASSOCIATES in the archives than there are in members in the paid database.

Just a thought, Gordon 

Hi Gordon,

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

We do have some plans around this area so this will definitely help in our analysis of enhancements.

Our current thinking is focused on these things:

1) Exclude people who have already registered from event reminders
2) Customization of event reminder emails

3) Merging  event registrants into main database (members). These would still count into overall total - just like they do now.

4) Using saved searches in event reminder options.