Allow organization leaders to access email address of people who want to get newsletters

[lilliealbert]

Organization leaders (i.e. admins for RailsBridge, GoBridge, MobileBridge, etc.) should be able to get the email addresses of people who want to receive newsletters & announcements from those orgs.

Feature Progress

• Allow users to update which orgs they want to get announcements from on their profile page
• Allow org leaders to access a list of opted-in people's email addresses (for their org only)
• Allow users to opt in to get announcement from Bridge Foundry
• Allow admins (or some other user?) to access a list of Bridge Foundry announcement opted-in people
• Allow users to update their announcement preferences without logging in
• Send an email to all Bridge Troll users prompting them to update their announcement preferences

The Core Feature

This feature would have two parts:

On a person's profile page, they'd see a list of the organizations that they'd want to get announcements from, something like:

If a box is checked, that person's email address is included in a list available only to organization leaders.

How To Get People To Update Their Options?

This feature is pretty simple to implement, but getting people to check that box is a bit more challenging. We can easily send an email to the whole of Bridge Troll announcing the feature and asking people to update their preferences, but I expect we'd get some significant drop off if people have to log in to sign up. So, some options:

1. Just email an announcement that people should go in and check some boxes if they'd like to get email announcements from their favorite Bridges.
   • If we do this and no one signs up, we could do more things after that, maybe? Not sure what our user's tolerance for emails asking them to sign up for more emails is.
2. Send an email that links to a special page that doesn't require log in that allows them to update their announcement preferences.
   • A kind of similar-ish thing exists currently with the "Quick UnRSVP" feature where users can click a link in their email to remove their RSVP. See this controller method
3. Send an email that has some kind of response parsing, where the person can type out which Bridges they want to subscribe do, and we somehow sign them up for the ones they include. (I think this is probably a bad idea.)

Background

RailsBridge is putting together a monthly newsletter. The communications team would like to be able to get everyone who has attended a RailsBridge workshop to opt-in if they want, so we were considering doing a one-time email to everyone who has RSVP'd to a RailsBridge workshop in Bridge Troll. But that is less useful long-term than having people have a setting in Bridge Troll.

Concerns

My main concern with this feature as proposed is that people might uncheck the box in Bridge Troll (thinking that will unsubscribe them), and then they'll get an email via whatever service the Bridge is using (i.e., MailChimp), and then be mad that they weren't actually unsubscribed.

But I think we can try it out and see how it goes, and if people are confused, iterate from there!

Feedback?

What do y'all think? Any concerns or ideas?

(I am thinking about per-chapter email access, too, but want to keep this thread focused on organization-wide emailing for now.)

[lilliealbert]

Another thing we could do with this is ask people when they RSVP to a workshop whether they'd like to get emails from the org, in the same way that we ask them if they'd like to get email announcements:

[aneyzberg]

This is great! I think option two of having a quick updating of their preference seems to me like the easiest way to get people to actually update their preferences if it is doable. I think you are right @lilliealbert that having people log in - we would see a significant drop off in people updating their preferences.

As far as having concerns about people being upset because they unsubscribe but we accidentally send them an email - I agree with you in that we can just try and see how it goes. That seems like the easiest approach to the problem. And I cannot speak for the other bridges, but given that RailsBridge does not send that many announcements - hopefully if someone receives an extra email after having unsubscribed- it does not irk them too badly and we can easily resolve the issue.

[ultrasaurus]

There was some discussion about this on one of the mailing lists a while back regarding some kind of combined newsletter with content from all the bridges (if there were any content), and I collected notes, but didn't move forward, since I didn't want to create a separate list of people in a newsletter service.

1. Could we (should we?) have a Bridge Foundry checkbox (or maybe it should be "General (Bridge Foundry)" or something since most people haven't heard of Bridge Foundry who come in thru an XBridge workshops.

2. Could there be a way to get news without signing up for a workshop?

[lilliealbert]

@ultrasaurus Yes and yes, I think!

1. Yep — I think that makes total sense.
2. I think of this feature as simply a way for Bridge Troll users to indicate that they want to hear from the Bridges. For example, I expect that we'll add a link on the RailsBridge website somewhere for people to subscribe directly to the RailsBridge newsletter.

Although keeping a separate list in MailChimp of newsletter subscribers is less ideal in some ways than keeping everything in Bridge Troll, I don't want to make someone create a Bridge Troll account just to sign up for a newsletter, and I don't want to build marketing emails tools into Bridge Troll at this point.

(The "hearing of Bridge Foundry" problem will also be lessened soon by the changing of the domain to events.bridgefoundry.org — I'll write a separate issue for that soon, but it's something that I'd like to move forward with in the next month or so.)

[kplawver]

A couple things:

• Yes! 👏 This would make things way easier than a one-time email blast to everyone.
• MailChimp's API makes it not super easy, but do-able, to keep those settings up to date between newsletter subscriptions and the site using their API + webhooks so when users change their newsletter subscription settings on the site, we update MailChimp and when if they unsubscribe via MailChimp, we could flip their boolean on BridgeTroll.

[ultrasaurus]

Also, I've heard from folks fairly often that it would be helpful to be able to email individual volunteers or reach out to repeat students about potentially volunteering. When adjusting the notification preferences, would be good to consider other planned/desired notifications, so they can fit into a consistent design/vocabulary.

related to

• Chapter leaders can email the entire chapter #441 Chapter leaders can email the entire chapter

[ultrasaurus]

@lilliealbert on #2 above, I guess I think of our "membership" as everyone who has ever participated in a workshop and that Bridge Foundry is the sum of all the Bridges (where the sum is greater than the parts). And announcement of a workshop is arguably "marketing" just to an audience who wants to know. If we're successful in the Bridge Foundry branding effort, then we'll attract people who want to sign up for a newsletter AND notification of a workshop in their region. I think that's something we'll want to solve for.

There's been talk about doing things like refactoring the cookbook and teacher training to have non-tech-specific stuff be in Bridge Foundry. Similarly, we've talked about other content, like how to find a mentor, or what is a mentor anyhow? Seems like that kind of content would be valuable across Bridges if/when other Bridges want a newsletter.

[lilliealbert]

@ultrasaurus If we want to encourage people to get onto the mailing lists without RSVPing to a workshop, we could easily add the mailing list checkboxes to the Bridge Troll signup flow (in addition to having it editable from their profile). Once this feature is in, creating a Bridge Troll account will be an easy way to get notified of new workshops and Bridge / Bridge Foundry announcements.

Let me know if you have any blocking concerns about this feature, otherwise I'm going to go ahead and work on it as described, and we can iterate from there!

[ultrasaurus]

@lilliealbert I've been looking into MailChimp, working with @laynemcnish on the idea of Bridge Foundry making a Newsletter which could have custom content for each Bridge. I'm starting with the draft template that a RailsBridge volunteer created and think I know how to set up the account to make this work.

I'm still confused how to avoid a one-time email blast to everyone... I think MailChimp needs to have the list of people who have ever opted in, but not sure how this would get started.

I'll keep experimenting with the actual options in MailChimp -- I got some great advice from a newsletter expert, who might actually be able to help produce at least the first couple of editions!

[lilliealbert]

@ultrasaurus I was planning on the one-time blast coming as a transactional email from Bridge Troll itself. Since we didn't ever tell people we'd have a newsletter, I don't think they'd be considered opted-in to getting one, so even if I did an export into a CSV of all the email addresses, I think we'd get marked as spam a lot if we just sent an opt-in email from Mailchimp.

So the idea would be to have people opt-in to getting a Bridge Foundry newsletter by clicking a link in an email from Bridge Troll that would then let them update their "subscription" settings in Bridge Troll to get emails from Bridge Foundry (or the individual Bridges, if we felt like doing that, too.)

[lilliealbert]

Also, most of the work of this feature is done already, although it was done focused on creating Bridge specific mailing lists, so we need to expand it a bit to allow for a general Bridge Foundry mailing list, too.

(We still need to merge in / review #484 for this feature.)

[ultrasaurus]

Proposed alternate implementation approach here:
#517

cc @cjo2118