Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Users Search
Help Dashboard Sign In Sign Up
Descriptions Incubator Q&A Meta
Incubator Q&A
Posts Tags Edits
Create Post

Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.

Comments on What is a good, simple way to send electronic updates to a small group?

Post

What is a good, simple way to send electronic updates to a small group? Question

+6
−0

What is a good way to send occasional updates (like meeting times) to a small group of people (5-20) electronically?

I see a lot of groups like this create a Facebook page and post updates on there, make the group public, and tell everyone interested to just follow the page. The problem with this is that people need to have a Facebook account, which not everyone wants to use.

A mailing list would be better, because most people do have an email account they keep up with. But setting up an actual mailing list (where people can sign up and unsubscribe) seems complicated and possibly a paid service. The alternative to a mailing list would be that whoever is sending updates has to manually keep a list of emails somewhere, and paste the whole list into the To: address of outgoing mails. Perhaps there is an easy way to set up a mailing list I'm not aware of.

Texting people would have the same issues as keeping the list of emails.

Creating a website would be great but it's a decent amount of work to set up and maintain. Not everyone is comfortable doing it. Even if you find someone to help set it up, in a few years that "expert" might disappear and then nobody knows how to maintain the site.

communities mass-communication
posted 6 months ago
user card
matthewsnyder‭
128 65 52
History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

2 comment threads

Classic forums? (2 comments)
Is this strictly 1-to-many, or do other people need to be able to broadcast too? (2 comments)
Classic forums?
Lundin‭ wrote 6 months ago
copy link

There's plenty of sites offering classic discussion forums. No need to develop anything, just register a site for your group. Then have people register to the forum which requires e-mail verification and optionally with manual verification/invitation of the user. Whoever got admin privileges on the forum ought to be able to send out announcements to all users over the forum software, so that no manual mailing lists need to be maintained. As a bonus you get a place where people can ask questions and have discussions. I have no up to date practical experience of being such a forum admin though, so I'll refrain from posting an answer (which ought to give some suggestions about forum sites/software too).

matthewsnyder‭ wrote 6 months ago
copy link

A forum might possibly work, although it has the drawbacks that many people:

  1. Don't like creating yet another account to post on the forum
  2. Aren't good at staying up to date with the forum (even if there is an "email about new posts" feature many people don't understand/use it)

But it's better than nothing, so if anyone would like to post an answer that mentions a specific service that would be valuable. I think just a generic "use a forum" isn't that helpful because there are many people trying to make money from their shoddy forum service out there, and it's hard to find the 1 good service in a sea of 100 crappy ones that paid more for SEO.