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houdiniproject / houdini

Free and open source fundraising infrastructure for nonprofits and NGOs
https://houdiniproject.org
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Contact lists for email newsletters and SMS alerts #238

Open heyakyra opened 4 years ago

heyakyra commented 4 years ago

It should be possible to manage contact lists that can be reached out individually or in bulk using integration with SMTP and/or SMS gateways. This is a major way nonprofits recruit, organize, and gain support. This also means that contact lists need not be donors or members

wwahammy commented 4 years ago

@heyakyra Very good point! One decision we need to make at some point is whether we want to add more email features into Houdini directly or delegate that work to a different system. I think that question will make more sense with background.

As background, Traditionally, Houdini has had very limited support for mailing nonprofit members through the CRM. There was a feature that allowed contacting individual supporters via Gmail accounts but it was limited and the newest restrictions on Gmail's API (requiring $50k annual audits) make it impractical to use. As for lists, Houdini has a limited Mailchimp integration for adding every supporter with a given tag to a Mailchimp list but it's not as reliable or full featured as we'd like. The default fallback option right now is to do a CSV export of supporters from the supporter dashboard. That works alright but that's a manual option.

For future goals, I'm currently working on a grant application for creating a more flexible eventing system. The idea is that adding a supporter, or making a donation would fire webhooks or other events. In a sense we do that already for mailing receipts but we'd be making something more flexible. The initial new use-case for that is to integrate a Houdini instance with an event integration system like OpenFn or Zapier. That would integrate Houdini with other types of CRMs as well as mailing list systems. That may address some of your concerns related to emails.

On the other hand, that doesn't address SMS alerts or emailing users directly unless you're using a third party CMS. I'm not super familiar with SMS systems but there's probably a set of SMS related features to consider in addition to alerts like text-to-donate. Do you see the idea of using a third party CMS or system feasible for your use-cases?