I've got round the MailChimp problem

By Za3tOoOr!

You may have seen that I've been quite excited about MailChimp lately. My excitement subsided though after Vic pointed out last week that there was a problem with users subscribing from .le.ac.uk addresses. I hadn't noticed because the initial 3,500 subscribers (which I blogged about here) had come via a Plone form - and I simply imported the csv file into MailChimp. And because I was already included on this list via my .le.ac.uk address I tested the subsequent form with other addresses - hence missing the .le.ac.uk problem (school boy error).

I contacted our IT Services and they said that MailChimp wasn't blacklisted. I contacted MailChimp and they said that there must be some kind of filter which was blocking it. The answer in the end was to create a non .le.ac.uk address for the mail to be seen to be coming from so as to get through the spam filter which blocks messages that seem to be pretending to be from .le.ac.uk addresses but are coming from an external service. So I created a sdzhelpdesk@gmail address and set up an auto-forward on that to send all mail to sdzhelpdesk@le.ac.uk. I then made sdzhelpdesk@gmail the default "Reply-to" email in MailChimp and it works! Confirmations from .le.ac.uk address are now received and replies to messages are routed through gmail to .le.ac.uk.

I've tested it with three different people but if you would be willing to check for me (if you have a .le.ac.uk address) you can do so here. And as I said in my tweet, thanks to Matt, MailChimp and ITS for helping solve the problem. And to Vic for spotting it.

Now I can get on to the serious business of using it for student engagement.

MailChimp mail delivered

Got in this morning to a confirmation email that my first MailChimp mail had been delivered. See below.

The reason there were 3,456 on the list rather than more than 3,500 (the figure I mentioned last week) is because when you upload a list the very clever little chimp notices duplicates. It also notices syntax errors so I was able to alter an address which was to @g,mail.com and and one which was @hotmail.,com. Very clever.

Now I need to wait and then check out the reports when more data has arrived. The report about 20 minutes after the delivery said as follows...

I’ve taken the plunge with MailChimp

Having mulled it over for a couple of days I've taken the plunge and become a fully paid up member of MailChimp. Having had more than 3,500 students sign up to our mailing list (yup, it surprised me too) I came to the conclusion that we couldn't manage such large numbers on an internal system. Doubtless I'll blog more about MailChimp when I've had more time to have test it, but just for now there are two features in particular that were clinchers for me.

1. It puts users in control - they can unsubscribe or update their profile at any time
2. It give email a social edge (no, really) by supporting Facebook page likes and adding sharing buttons

I thought I'd spotted a catch last night when I said thought they tied users in by not letting you export contact lists. I tweeted the thought and within two minutes I had a reply from MailChimp telling that I could export lists and with a link to the place telling me how. I was very impressed.

What I'm most concerned about now is what to say. Here's a link to a browser based draft and there's a screen shot of it below. If you have any comments on any aspect of the email (content, tone, style) then I'd be really grateful to hear them. I plan to send it tomorrow afternoon. Or maybe I should wait until Monday morning?

Mailing list managers

An update on the Good old fashioned email post - I've now had more than 3,000 people sign up to our mailing list. With that many people on the list I need a mailing list manager. Obviously I'd like to push more of them to our Facebook and Twitter accounts but as Marta said in the comments 'I guess we have to give them what they've signed up to'. They've asked for email. What I want to avoid though is having to reply to lots of emails - so we'll just use it as a channel to push information out - which is why I'd prefer it if they used social media because then the communication can be much more responsive. We can quickly reply to a tweet or a Facebook post and the one-to-many nature of social media means that everybody else can benefit from the answer. With email it's one-to-one and there's no way we're spending time responding to 3,000 questions, many of them probably similar.

So, does anyone know anything about mailing list managers? I think I need to learn about them quickly. We can't use our University CFS system for mailing to such large numbers easily because there's a limit of 1,000 people per email. Also, if we're going to use email then I want people to be able to unsubscribe easily should they want to, again, there's no easy way of doing this with CFS. A good mailing list manager should also give us several other useful features, including easy delivery, tracking and groups that support preferences.

I've heard of MailChimp and it looks good but we'd need to pay for it ($50 a month) because the free accounts are only for up to 1,000 addresses. It also has the potential to integrate with Facebook and Twitter.

Becka told me that they use Majordomo at Bradford. It describes itself as "a program which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. Commands are sent to Majordomo via electronic mail to handle all aspects of list maintenance. "

I've also stumbled across Mailman whic says "Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more."

I'm desperately in need of some advice from this from people who have used such things...

Good old fashioned email

I've thought a lot about how we publicise our services in the last 12 months (for instance a couple of posts tagged publicity and all the Facebook stuff). I've thought about our website, social media, digital signage, email newsletters and print. All with a view to engaging students in what we do. More recently we've summarised our diverse range of services in some simple statements (I blogged about the first draft of those here), which have helped both staff as well as students understand more what we do and how it fits together. They're as follows:

• Succeed in your studies
• Gain experience
• Develop your career

Incrementally we are getting more engagement, evidenced in part by the number of 'Likes' on our Facebook page (but I'm trying to get beyond likes). We've also been running a Student Development roadshow this week to get out and about on campus to tell students (and possibly staff) about what we do. In spite of all this activity I was still suspicious when I got in this morning to find more 1,800 emails in my roadshow signup subfolder. I asked on Twitter if anyone knew why it might be (I'd suspected David might have popped something up on the Students' Union Facebook page) but in the end I found out it was via a good old fashioned email from Paul Jackson, our Director (see below). It went to all students and we now have more than 2,300 responses since 17:46 yesterday (more than 500 of which were since having made the form University of Leicester login only).

So I've been musing about why this worked so well. I think there are a number of factors:

• timing - I suspect people are more responsive to this kind of thing at the beginning of the academic year (especially freshers?)
• tone - I think Paul struck a good tone in the email - supportive and friendly
• simplicity - the email only asked students to do one thing 'click the link to receive important information'
• clarity - I also think that the 'succeed in your studies, gain experience, develop your career' thing is nice and clear
• incentive - there's a chance to win a £50 iTunes voucher if you sign up (as a University of Leicester student) - but I'd be surprised if that made a big difference

Now I need to do make sure that we capitalise on this initial interest. I also need to think about how to manage such big numbers. I'm certainly going to encourage people towards our Facebook and Twitter accounts, but maybe students just like good old fashioned email. I thought that was for old people.

Publicity channels

Part of my role in Student Development involves overseeing publicity. When I started in the role 18 months ago we were using only traditional forms of media to communicate with students; flyers, posters, emails and our website (all broadcast media that allow little or no two-way communication and simply pushes information to recipients). Since last summer I’ve been developing our networks on Facebook and Twitter (social media that does allow two-way communication and recipients select to ‘pull’ information towards themselves) to supplement the traditional methods. So we now have a range of publicity options available to us that I thought it would be helpful to outline – and if you have any suggestions or comments I’d be really pleased to hear them.

Website

Our website is our primary means of communication. I’m concious that we need to reorganise our front page (the subject of a future post) because we’re running out of space to put stuff, but that aside, here are elements I use within the site for publicity purposes.

News items (within Plone) are vital as they keep the website dynamic and also populate RSS feeds which I use to push out to Facebook and Twitter (see how here).

Event items also add a dynamic element to our site and populate RSS feeds in the same was as the news items do.

Top level portlets at the Student Development level of the website to highlight services that we want to give a particular push to at any given time. At the moment we’re doing this with our Graduate Success Programme (but we only have room to display one item like this at a time – which is one of the reasons we need to redesign the front page).

Team level portlets at the relevant team level – in the case of the Graduate Success Programme that’s in Career Development.

Mini sites to create an uncluttered site focussing on a particular event. In order to de-clutter an area I block the portlets above in the folder structure and start the navigation at the relevant level. If the event is to be a regular one Ialso request a specific URL, for example (again) www.le.ac.uk/graduatesuccess.

Social media

As already described I’ve been using social media to try and engage with students for some time now. More recently my focus has switched from Twitter to Facebook and in particular how to encourage interaction not just ‘Likes’. To this end I’ve been trying the following:

• extra Facebook and Twitter updates (as per Helpdesk Hollie’s advice) in addition to our automated RSS outputs
• a specific Facebook push – like we tried recently with Revision and exam skills (which seemed to work)

Digital signage

There are various plasma screens around campus which make up the University’s digital signage one of which is in the Student Development Zone. The screens generally operate on a 10 second cycle; scrolling through the notices set to display. The images and text displayed on these screens, therefore, have to convey information quickly and simply.

More important than our own screen (the traffic that it gets is limited given our location) are the other screens around campus – in particular in the Help Zone on the Ground floor of the Library, the Graduate School Reading Room, the Library Cafe and (especially) the screens in the Students’ Union.

Newsletters

Because not everyone looks at our website or joins our social media networks we also send out a monthly newsletter to all students. This comprises of just a few highlights plus a link to further highlights of the month’s news from our news feeds. Click here for the June edition.

Print

And for completeness I thought I should mention print. Although for publicity purposes we’re beginning to move away from print because it’s usually high cost for a relatively low impact.

Any suggestions? Have I missed anything?

How to write an effective essay

Look what Marta and Lucy have come up with! It's primarily a printed resource that Marta and Lucy have sent to students via their departments, but I'm interested to know how you think we should put it on the website. We could just embed it (as below) but it doesn't really work because on paper it's all folded up. What do you suggest?

Top 10 essay tips for students by stujohnson