[Chapter-delegates] Email and Fonteva (was Re: Re: Questions to Internet Society Board of Trustees from the UK England Chapter of the Internet Society)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

I think we have tried, more than once, to address the question below, but the way this was stated gave me a new idea about how to address it; so I hope this round will help to explain to people why something they think should be trivial is in fact not.

On Sat, Mar 30, 2024 at 07:11:52PM +0300, Nazar Nicholas via Chapter-delegates wrote:

>short of being “ user friendly “. It was touted as robust AMS but having
>used it I feel that when you are sending a simple email to member, you have
>got to first qualify as a techie. Sending email is supposed to be a 1,2,3
>and there it goes! But for FONTEVA you have to hussle to send a simple
>email. Why could they integrate in the Fonteva AMS a simple email sending
>platform like gmail type of thing?

The challenge that I think many people are having is that they're imagining sending email to chapter members from the chapter (i.e. from the chapter's account, or from an officer's account, or whatever) is like sending an email from one person to another, or even to a mailing list.  But it isn't, and the reason has to do with spam control laws as well as anti-spam techniques that mail providers use.

When you send mail _as an organization_, you fall under various spam-control regimes around the world.  All of them, it appears, have two basic classes of things.  One of them are strictly required communications that are a necessary part of being associated with the association in question.  So, for instance, when you sign up for membership in a chapter, there are certain emails that you are _intrinsically_ agreeing to get, and the only way not to get those is to give up being a member.  These mails, even if not wanted, are not "spam" because they are part of the function of being a member at all.

Other mails are the sort of thing that a member might not want to hear about, even if it is generally of interest to chapter membership.  This might be, for instance, progress on a major chapter initiative.

Anti-spam legislation treats these two cases very differently, and therefore we have to have a mechanism to do so.  This is the reason for the somewhat complicated set-up of profiles before sending email.  As others have already noted on this list, once the profiles are set up, they can be re-used.  But we recognize that this is an unaccustomed part of the workflow.

That is the reason we have tried to provide a number of different resources for people who are having to operate this new workflow element.  We have dedicated support staff that are available to help you with this as you are developing your workflow.  Please continue to rely on us to provide that support, so that every chapter can be successful with this and also so that we can all comply with antispam regulations and laws.

Best regards,

A

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Andrew Sullivan, President & CEO, Internet Society
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