Award-winning public relations professional and former broadcast journalist, Marlynn Jayme Schotland created Mamapreneurs Inc. to provide support and networking opportunities to business owners who are also mothers. Based in Portland, Oregon, the organization reaches out online to “mamapreneurs” anywhere in the world. Here, Marlynn talks ...

Why would your organization want to pay for an email marketing service, instead of simply using Outlook and your regular email server to contact your members? There are a number of compelling reasons why even a small e-newsletter subscription list might best be handled by a dedicated email marketing service, starting — first and foremost — ...

Could your organization get a message to all your members within 48 hours?  One small assocation thought so --  until last week, when an unexpected event revealed a major flaw in how the group was communicating with its members.This is a real-life example of a real nonprofit organization, but let's just call it Association XYZ  -- a ...

Cleaning up a mailing list is never quite as easy as it should be. To purge an inactive address from your database can feel like you're letting go of something that could ''come in handy'' someday — even if it's not useful now, and hasn't been productive for quite some time. Just like spring-cleaning your home, however, a good clean-up ...

The more you know about your members, the better your organization can serve them. As we've mentioned, a variety of free tools for online polls are available to  answer the simple questions -- but sometimes you need more detailed information from your members. Would you like to be able to track each individual's response, instead of ...

Spend just a half-hour in a nonprofit office, and you're likely to be all too familiar with  MS Word's mail merge feature -- or at least, with the sheets of peel-and-stick mailing labels that can quickly be generated with it!  And where would a nonprofit be, without mail merge to help quickly create those direct mail pieces and ...