NEWSLETTERS "hard and soft"

[dennis smith]

I have created several newsletters, some have been printed and mailed, but all are emailed. My ship was decom in 1995 so we still have a few members on active duty, but those are the kids. As far as I can see most regular reunion attendees are in their 60s or beyond. It is much easier to travel to a reunion after the children are grown and gone, and hopefully our finances are more in order. My experience shows that most, better than 95%, of our members have email addresses. I also see that many email addresses change often and I am almost never notified. A fair number of members register but never, or rarely, go back into the site. In my Association http://www.ussdale.com, we are active in trying to get members to register on our website. There are about 150+ registered members, I have almost 300 USPS mail addresses that I send printed mail to. Although I am very comfortable online, At 63 years of age, I seem to be in the minority.
I feel that by focusing most of your output on the website will miss a lot of potential reunion attendees, and that is what we are looking for. I keep a separate list of members that I call my 'snail mail' list, they get everything mailed.
All this is a lot of work but so was port-and-starboard watches on YANKEE STATION and I don't regret a moment of either.

[Skip Sander]

I agree with all the points you make.

When we get a changed email address, I call the guy if he's been active in the organization. Otherwise, when we get a bunch of them, I send postcards to each of them telling them we've lost their email address and asking them to send us an email so we can capture the new one. Most of the time, this works. (We have a pretty powerful member database, so it's easy for us to retrieve all the data that's involved, to print out the postcards, etc.)

[cgn40]

I have had the same experiance's with changed email address's. I ask every member for their Home address and phone plus Cell if they have one.
Most people forward their snail mail for a year, so you will still get a shot at contacting them, if you send something in the mail as soon as you get your first error message on them.