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openaustralia / oaf

OpenAustralia Foundation
https://github.com/openaustralia/oaf#readme
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Look for a replacement email campaign platform #269

Closed jamezpolley closed 5 years ago

jamezpolley commented 5 years ago

We currently have a self-hosted CiviCRM on Wordpress instance which we use to handle the mailouts for the annual EOFY donations drive. We have about 90k addresses in two main categories - PlanningAlerts and Everyone Else. We also use it to manage recurring and one-off donations via Stripe (but this issues is focused on the mailing list use).

We've had a history of issues with CiviCRM - eg, unsubscribes/opt-outs not working as expected (#24, #177, #238, probably others) (also many issues with stripe integration, but that isn't the focus here). It seems likely that some of these problems are things we could work around if we knew more about how to use CiviCRM (eg, #238 seems to have mostly been a lack of experience with CiviCRM), while some others are bugs that would be solved if we could upgrade CiviCRM.

However: upgrading CiviCRM involves upgrading the underlying OS and switching to php7; and then continual maintenance and upgrades; and it wouldn't solve the experience gap.

The upgrades are within our technical capabilities, and the experience gap could be fixed - but none of this would help advance the Foundation's core goals. At the moment, time is the most scarce resource we have, and this would consume a lot of time.

So - let's consider alternatives.

Our requirements are:

Nice to have (this list is a braindump and probably contains ideas that will be rejected as not the kind of marketing we want to do):

jamezpolley commented 5 years ago

CampaignMonitor looks excellent, but only scales to 50,000 list members before we'd have to ask for custom pricing. I've fired off a request for custom pricing, but got an error message - "We are sorry. Our servers are busy and we are not able to submit your request at this time.". Support only seems to be available on a US phone number. At 50,000 list members, we're already looking at 460.90USD/month.

Alternatively, there's a "Per campaign" price structure - $7 per mailout, plus 1.5c per recipient - around 1500 per mailout. We would be able to use dynamic content to have slightly different emails for PlanningAlerts vs everyone-else audiences. Total cost for two emails as part of the EOFY drive would be around $2500, taking into account the 15% NFP discount

jamezpolley commented 5 years ago

I haven't looked into MailChimp as deeply yet. Their "Standard" plan scales to 100,000 subscribers for USD499/month; "Mailchimp offers a 15% discount to nonprofits and charities." which should bring that down a little. That still makes it close to $6k/year.

jamezpolley commented 5 years ago

We've decided to go ahead with CampaignMonitor. Further work on EOFY2019 tracked in https://github.com/openaustralia/oaf/issues/272

jamezpolley commented 5 years ago

Another option would be continuing to self-host CiviCRM, but get support to get it configured and maintained. I've spoken to an australian host to get a quote for rough costings for this option. Because of the volume of subscribers we have, their suggestion is that we provide an m5.large instance and allow them access for support and maintenance.

Costing for this option are available in https://github.com/openaustralia/oaf-internal/issues/66.

dptarrant commented 5 years ago

James, I might be able to help. If you want to take this off line you can contact me at dtarrant@nubay.org