Latest revision as of 18:59, 4 April 2013

Send a newsletter

Lora receives the stories from X for review and puts them into WordPress.
Kathi then reviews them.
Lora generates the final draft.
Lora, Kathi, Jeremiah and Bob reviews the final draft (by sending a test mail to each one).
Allan sends it.

Under Posts create a new category under the Newsletters category. Name it using this format: "Newsletter YYYY-MM"
Write each story into a separate posts in WordPress and save them as drafts.
- Tag them with both the Article category and the new category you created above.
- Write an excerpt in the Excerpt section. This will be the text written in the actual e-mail newsletter. If you don't see the Excerpt section anywhere on the screen, click on Screen Options in the top-right corner and put a checkmark next to Excerpt.
- Normally you don't want to cross-post them to Facebook/Twitter at this time. We will write a news item that automatically will be posted to Facebook/Twitter.
- The stories will be ordered by publishing date, the newest will be listed first (be careful not to set a future publishing date, then people won't be able to see the story!).
Find an image for each story and upload it in WordPress (under the Media menu).
- WE DON'T DO THIS ANY LONGER. ((Attach the image to the category with correct year/month name under the Newsletter category. You might need to add the year/month category first.))
- Edit each post to both place the image where you want it within the story as well as setting as the featured image (usually lower right corner of screen).

Publish each of the posts in WordPress.
Generate the actual e-mail content ("mail content") by running the Generate newsletter script (Main menu -> Mail content -> Generate newsletter).
- This simply generates a record under "Mail content" - just like if you yourself had gone there to create some mail content. So you can go and edit it and even delete it in case you want to re-generate it.
Go lookup the mail content and verify that it looks as desired.
- If the excerpts contain special characters they will look strange. For now we have not been able to automatically get them converted correctly, so until we find a fix for that you will need to correct those characters manually. It is usually quotes that are the problem.
You can send a test mailing from under Mail Contents to see how the actual newsletter e-mail will look like.
Allan verify before sending:
- all links work
- link to pixel-tag
- "&" replaced by "&"
- generic link surrounding the entire newsletter

Use the mass mailing system to select the query, the mailing content, and then send the newsletter.
- Consider if it should also be sent to those that are marked for receiving a hardcopy newsletter.
Make a news post telling about the new newsletters that has been published.
- Ensure you cross-post the news item to Facebook/Twitter.

@@ Line 20: / Line 20: @@
 **The stories will be ordered by publishing date, the newest will be listed first (be careful not to set a future publishing date, then people won't be able to see the story!).
 *Find an '''image''' for each story and upload it in WordPress (under the Media menu).
-**Attach the image to the '''category''' with correct '''year/month''' name under the Newsletter category. You might need to add the year/month category first.
+**WE DON'T DO THIS ANY LONGER. ((Attach the image to the '''category''' with correct '''year/month''' name under the Newsletter category. You might need to add the year/month category first.))
 **Edit each post to both place the image where you want it within the story as well as setting as the featured image (usually lower right corner of screen).
@@ Line 39: / Line 39: @@
 **generic link surrounding the entire newsletter
 <br>
 == Send the newsletter  ==