July 2008

Would you like a solid, free way to send your constituents eNewsletters, action alerts or donation requests? VerticalResponse, a dependable, feature-rich blast emailing tool, is now offering up to 10,000 emails a month free to 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Will it meet your needs? It might well.

The ability to email thousands of people for free sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch? There really isn’t one, as far as we can tell. VerticalResponse provides a solid feature set. It allows you to create your email either from scratch or using pre-designed templates. You can then easily choose a group to email from the your stored constituent email addresses, or define complex segments—for instance, you can email only those people who live in New York, are part of your jazz group and opened your last email.

Integrating the email addresses in standalone bulk emailing tools with other databases, like your donor management system, is always complex. But VerticalResponse does it as well as any tool in this area, with a number of different ways to get data in and out. Sophisticated features let people opt-in to your email list on your Web site, and it integrates completely with Salesforce.com, an online constituent management software.

The service is also excellent at getting emails to your constituents’ inboxes rather than their spam filters. VerticalResponse reviews every email sent through the system, and stringent anti-spam policies help avoid the deliverability issues faced by many other large email blasting services. But these policies also result in a drawback—if you have multiple lists, there's no easy way to let people manage which they want to subscribe to. You're required to have a link that allows anyone to globally unsubscribe from all of your lists—resulting, perhaps, in more unsubscriptions than you’d get otherwise.

Any other downsides? Well, after the first 10,000 emails each month, you're charged the regular nonprofit rate, which isn't the cheapest rate around. If you’re sending more than 25,000 emails or so per month, you might want to compare their prices with other packages.

Lastly, they have just started this free-emails-for-nonprofits program. We have no reason to suspect it will go away anytime soon, but there’s no specific guarantee the company won’t change prices or terms down the road. If you’re not in a hurry, it might make sense to wait a few months to make sure VerticalResponse can keep up with the demand for the program before making a switch.

But all in all, it looks like a great package—and for smaller lists, you certainly can’t beat the price!

For More Information

Idealware, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, provides impartial information to help nonprofits choose software - and we have a lot more resources about bulk emailing tools! All these resources are free, unless otherwise noted.

Choosing Bulk Email Software to Match Your Communication Goals

Are you hoping to send a monthly eNewsletter to your constituents? Or would action alerts or donation requests align better with your goals?This article helps you think through the features you’ll need in a bulk emailing tool to support the type of emails you plan to send. 

A Few Good Email Newsletter Tools

Online Seminar: Choosing eNewsletter Software

Thursday, September 18th, 1:00 - 2:30 EST, $40 registration fee
Want much more information? In this seminar, we'll walk through what you need to know in order to setup, send, and track eNewsletters effectively, demo VerticalResponse, and compare a number of other blast emailing tools.

Seminar Recording: Choosing eNewsletter Software

$20 fee
Can't wait until September? Want all the info for half the price? Purchase a recording of our June seminar, which includes a demo and discussion of Vertical Reponse.

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