Add Email Send Out Functionality

[Lermatroid]

No description provided.

[Lermatroid]

Needs planning.

• What kind of functionality it serves
• Should be just for admins to send out emails or include automatic emails for reminders, etc. ?
• Platform to use (Amazon SES, Mailchimp, Sendgrid, etc.)

[Xevion]

I really like UTD's email design. Pasted here for reference.

And the footer:

[Xevion]

I especially like the tid-bit about advertising projects - community engagement and promotion of projects is a crazy hard thing to get, so creating a mailing list cycle of projects going would be great. Reaching out and asking to promote people's projects might get the ball rolling on it, too.

[Xevion]

Some thoughts though.

• I think emails should be tailored for low-frequency, important emails. Monthly/bi-weekly newsletters should be hand-crafted and incorporate unique text. They need to be proofread.
• Notification emails should be created for events, and people should be able to tune them.
  • Event Reminders (like 3 to 1 to day of event)
  • Event Sign-up Confirmations
  • Account Signup
  • Monthly Calendar (but what's the point if no one's adding their events onto Portal anyways?)
  • Officer Administration Reminders (would require some way to identify individual officers, especially to tailor organizations and notify them of important things - currently impossible).

[Xevion]

I also think there should be some way to modify templates quickly, as well as see what they look. Keep the important stuff static (like header images, styling), but allow text and certain meta links dynamic.

Rendering them somehow should not be difficult.

Analytics should also be tracked - what emails were sent to who - but keep anything crazy precise to the platform we use to send emails. Thousands of emails will be sent if this is implemented - storing more than a couple hundred bytes PER EMAIL would add up massively over time.