Sync members database with email global contacts
John Vaille
Consider adding data integration between a customer's member database and its email account global contact list. This would help us address the ned to communicate with sub-groups of members through the creation of contact groups rather than creating a website based communication blast group each time we want to reach those particular members. Ideally, you and your email vendor might create an API that regularly synchs up the two or that would regularly update the email contacts with member info.
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Linda Carey
This is a major problem and a major time waste. Being able to sync with the website contact lists would enable us to utilize the webmail account. It’s practically unusable in its current format.
Roberta Reed
I just created email accounts for president, secretary, and treasurer. I was expecting all our members would automatically be in the contact list of those emails. What a disappointment. What is the benefit of having “official” email accounts with no contact list in them?
Meredith Owens
Roberta Reed: As Wes explained below, our email account provider doesn't currently have a way for us to sync member information to an email account's webmail contacts. To be able to do this, they'd first need to develop that feature.
In the meantime, you can add contacts to your email accounts by following these instructions: https://help.hoa-express.com/en/articles/3754015-creating-contact-lists.
For further assistance with this, please contact our customer success team!
John Vaille
Meredith Owens: I’m quite surprised that you continue contracting with an email provider that does not provide you with the capability under discussion here. This sort of back end feature is standard and as you can see, very important to your customers. Please fix this.
Jim Williams
This feature would be very nice to have! As a work-around, I've gone to the Members page, and clicked on the "Invite to join" button. It's a free form text box (i.e. doesn't need to be an invitation to join). An email distribution can be pasted into the distribution box (each email address needs to be separated with a comma). Kludgy, but it works.
Linda Graumann
Jim Williams: how did you create the email distribution list? Via an export?
Jim Williams
Linda Graumann: An export will work if they're already in the membership list. The kludgy part comes in when the comma delimiter needs to be added. I paste the spreadsheet into a Word document, then use "Replace All" to convert the paragraph marks into commas.
Maybe HOA can simplify this process by providing a comma deliminated list?
Meredith Owens
Linda Graumann and Jim Williams: If you export the "Member view" from the "Members" section on the website, that information will be downloaded as a CSV file. You can then use that file to import contacts into an outside email client like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail.
Currently, if you'd like to import contacts into the webmail portal, you'll need to convert this to a vCard (.vcf) or .ldif file.
Jim Williams
Meredith Owens: Agree that Member Export puts it into .csv format, but you need to put it into a spreadsheet so the email addresses are in one column. Copy that column, add the comma's, and then paste into the "Email(s) Comma separate list" box of the "Invite to Join" option in Members, and you've got yourself a way to send bulk emails. No .vcf or .ldif file required.
Meredith Owens
Jim Williams: Our “Invite to join” feature is for requesting new members to register in your community. The subject and title of those invitation messages, which can't be altered, will be geared toward inviting people to register on the website.
Instead, if you need to send a message to all or some of the members registered on your website, you'll want to use the blast emailing feature in the "Communications" section. Here, you can select for the reply-to address to be one of the email accounts you've created.
Jim Williams
Meredith Owens: Agreed. It's Kludgy. But it works. The problem we're trying to solve is to be able to send emails to sub-groups of people without the painful process of manually creating a Group every time. Here's some ways it could be solved:
- Allow import of names & email addresses into a Group (bonus points if the addresses aren't necessarily already members)
- Member Export feature in .vcf format that can be imported into webmail.hoa.email. (I believe that currently, before creating a distribution list, all the membership names must first be manually entered into Contacts ...Awkward!)
- Expand the "Invite to Join" feature to be able to modify the subject line. ...and provide a modifiable reply-to address.
Wes Cossick
Jim Williams: To import member information, you can use our import feature. It takes a little bit more than just names and email addresses to set up member profiles, so that's the feature you'd need to use before adding those members into a group using the groups section. You can, however, easily add members to a group in bulk; just check off each one you want to add before clicking the "Add to group" button.
I've created a new post regarding exporting to .vcf files, and added you as a voter: https://feedback.hoa-express.com/feature-requests/p/export-members-as-vcf-files.
To prevent abuse, we don't intend to allow customers to send bulk emails to any email address with customizable titles or subjects, directly from the website. We recommend using an email client for this purpose.
Wes Cossick
A note from our engineering team: currently our email account provider does not expose a way for us to manage an email account's webmail contacts. For us to be able to sync member information to an email account's webmail contacts, our email account provider would first have to develop that feature.
John Vaille
Wes Cossick: seems to me like this sort of integration would add significant value to your webmail providers product and offer you a way to further provide value to your customers. Consider placing an enhancement request with them.
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Chris Juzda
This is overdue IMHO. but there should be a way to enable you to just select individual(s) to send emails to rather than having to create a group or sync or export to another contact list