The most important thing for this site was to provide a way to make it easy for staff to create their weekly newsletter. The newsletter presents a week-in-review, featuring a commentary and excerpts of 20 articles or so, grouped by subject matter.

I used Drupal to create this dynamic site: odac-info.org. To automate the production of the newsletter, I used the simplenews and relatedcontent modules, along with custom module and theme elements I wrote. ODAC staff use the system to automatically generate the code for each week's newsletter. To generate the code for the newsletter all that is needed is to select a set of articles, group them by category, specify sort order and press go. The system gives you access to the custom-generated code to provide ultimate formatting flexibility.

It turns out that the simplenews module wasn't doing everything we needed it to do, so we set up mailchimp.com for email marketing and list management. It provides detailed reporting including, for example, email open and click-through rates. It also requires you to conform to certain code details that improve deliverability, and offers an advanced testing suite that makes it easy to see how your email looks as displayed on various platforms.

I combined the custom content generation I created using Drupal with the mailchimp email service to provide a comprehensive solution that is easy to use. The result has been a higher quality newsletter delivered to a greater number of subscribers.

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