To automate the production of the Post Carbon monthly newsletter, I used the simplenews and relatedcontent modules, along with custom code and style elements I wrote. Post Carbon staff used the system to automatically generate the code for each month's newsletter.

As I had found with the ODAC site, the simplenews module wasn't enough to meet our needs. Therefore I 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.

Since the monthly newsletter involves images and more custom formatting, we found that we can get the best quality by using a template and building the code by hand. They now start by testing the code in mailchimp first, in the context of HTML email, since this context requires using a more limited and redundant code. We need to stick to a least-common-denominator of workable code so that it will display nicely on all the major email platforms. Because there were staff with HTML experience, this turned out to be the best solution. By using the mailchimp email testing suite over time, we carefully tested and improved the code template. The result has been a higher quality newsletter that requires less staff time to produce.

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