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What is a good, simple way to send electronic updates to a small group? Question
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.
2 answers
Jon Ericson[1] is working on pretty much what you asked for. It seems to be Discourse with a different base configuration that emails collaborators by default. There is a free open Beta for small communities.
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Formerly of Stack Exchange, and occasional contributor here at Codidact. ↩︎
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The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| matthewsnyder | (no comment) | Dec 12, 2023 at 18:16 |
Google Groups, which comes with all free Google accounts, can be used to set up a mailing list. It also integrates with the rest of Google resources, so for example you can share a calendar with a group rather than adding each user in the group one at a time.
There used to be an answer here about groups.io which is like Google Groups, but seems to have better controls and not tied to the Google ecosystem. It has more feature for managing different recipients for a group (seems like with Google Groups it's always the one list of people) but because it's not part of Google you don't get to use it for share permissions. It's free for up to 100 members. I don't know why they deleted it, but groups.io is arguably a better option than Google Groups.
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