UKH

My local club has been using Yahoo Groups for several years, however it seems to be incredibly flaky at present (mostly undelivered messages, however the interface is also pretty poor). I've been taking a quick look online and it seems that there are loads of different options. Facebook groups are out as we have plenty of members who have no desire to progress beyond email (we do have one and it is used by the willing members but the old and grumpy will never use it).

The following options look like they may be useful but without a fair bit of playing I won't know for sure:

https://gaggle.email/ - Seems to cost about £1.50/ month, seems to work, it's got an incredibly basic interface and can deal with file attachments, basically does what Yahoo Groups promises to do but no more.

groups.io seems to be much more well featured with the free option providing rather more functionality than that offered by gaggle mail or Yahoo Groups. It seems pretty straightforward from an admin perspective too.

What do you guys use for club communication? What would you actively not recommend?

Cheers

Spenser

Nice.

Facebook - as well as being an unnecessarily heavyweight way to deliver what in your case would largely be text - has been proven to be completely untrustworthy on matters of personal privacy. Maybe those in your club who don't want to use it take the same view?

It might be worth investigating MailChimp. Although it is primarily used as a marketing tool, it does offer free group email facilities which should be suitable for your needs. Although having said that, I'm not sure whether it allows attachments. 

The club's Facebook Group has been very helpful as a way of recruiting younger members into the club so I don't think there is any appetite to kill it off (particularly given that despite the privacy concerns a significant of club members do use Facebook). Due partly to the privacy issues, the invasive nature of Facebook and, for some, an unwillingness to progress beyond email I have no interest in trying to force club members onto the platform. Also the way in which Facebook deals with its feed and the layout of a group it can be difficult to go back and find details if any time has passed so I am not convinced it would meet our requirements for this.

Thanks for pointing me at Mail Chimp Harry, unfortunately it looks like it would only work as a "top down" tool for communications from the committee to the membership rather than enabling members to communicate with each other.

I've had a bit of a look at groups.io and it seems as though it has all of the functionality we are after while also dealing with some of the wishlist for our new website, I'm just waiting for my request to set up a group to be approved to play about with it properly.

Sure, entirely reasonable. My response was prompted by your arch dismissal of those who wouldn't want to use something provided by Facebook as 'old and grumpy.' You could have just left that comment out.

Back to your request: can you clarify exact lywhat you want out of any such service? Just mass one-way email shots from club official(s) to members? Or some other thing which might also allow 'two-way' communications? In addition: are you also running (or paying for) a website of some kind?

Clarifications of those questions might generate more focussed replies.

our ISP for our club website provides mailing lists via mailman,  works fine.  very capable and pretty easy to administer if you have some IT skills.

Some of them describe themselves as old and grumpy, but I recognise that my remark was unhelpful.

We currently use the mailing list for members to coordinate after work climbing in the summer and other informal activities with each other so it needs to be fairly straightforward to use and facilitate two way discussion with any member of the club able to pick up the discussion. We already have a suitable facility for formal one way communications from the committee (The Newsletter is distributed via this with everyone BCC'ed, Mailchimp might be of use for this if the newsletter editor has any issues with it).

Various of the older members have complained about having to remember a variety of usernames and passwords so something which requires another login to be used (like a forum on the club website, or Slackchat etc) would likely be a none starter, some of the younger members seem to strongly prefer using the Facebook group as they use Facebook for most personal communication anyway. I think the ideal mechanism would be able to interface the Facebook group with emails.

We do have our own website (www.oread.co.uk), we are looking at updating it at the moment so tieing the two systems together would be a possibility, although I think we are wanting to keep the new website quite simple to enable us to keep maintenance of the website within the club so this may not be feasible (I'll freely admit that my knowledge of website design is pretty weak, thankfully I have nothing to do with running the website!).

Thanks

Googlegroup. Our club uses it. Seems to work fine. Sends messages out to email addresses. Should fit your needs?

Recently my club, SDMC moved from Yahoo groups to Slack, which seems OK but it's still early days. another of my clubs, the KMC use Scribble.

Thanks everyone, I've got various options to have a play with over the next few weeks now, hopefully one of them will work for us.

Yahoo has been appalling for years. It's definitely time to move to something else.

We use a Gmail group for club messages, which seems to work fine. We use Facebook to post pictures and attract new members. Occasionally someone will suggest using Facebook to arrange meets, but they give up pretty quickly when they don't get any response.

For a pure mailing list manager I'd echo the suggestion of GNU 'mailman' above. It's very well-proven - but how easy it will be to integrate into your existing systems is a good question. It really depends on how much control of those systems you have.

Your existing site seems to be built using Joomla. Googling just now, there are 'bulletin board'-style extensions to that (e.g. Kunena) which might be worth a look. I have no direct experience with any of that though, so I can't recommend.

Good luck with it all!

A straight-forward mailing list host is freelists.org who we use at work for a software-related mailing list. The only downside is that users have to subscribe themselves, you can't give it a list of email addresses to start the list off.

My running group BathBats uses Groupspaces, which gives a group email address so that an email sent to the group address goes to all. Been using it for ten years now and it seems to do the business...various options available as to who can manage it etc and there are also basic website functions we don't bother with. From memory its free for up to 50 members and a small charge for more.  

Hi  as I said above we use mailman and it allows us to maintain as many lists we like (committee@y..., members@y..., climbers@y..., walkers, skiing ......) Two of us oversee it which is pretty trivial and it has all the usual unsubscribe mechanisms so users can leave if they want.  Members can have any old email address they like, can be set up to confirm their email but we typically just add them by copy and paste.  We can also set up as many email accounts eg secretary@ membership@... as we like

We can restrict who can post to the list (we don't moderate). I think we have to spend about 10 mins a month on it once set up

Your hosting service (https://www.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk/) provides a 'cpanel' interface like ours and they have mailman (with some restrictions).  If you want a mailing list my suggestion is have a real one!  Your website doesn't seem to have a login for members area (neither does ours) so no conflict with integration into other systems.

We do also have a google account for the committee to keep and share documents (finance, trip info , images etc)