CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi - as Dave and Lobo know, we have rather a lot of permutations to accomplish in our set up. We are looking at around 200 different issues all of which need to be available for Mailing List, and we also need to be able to cut the database by a couple of hundred different 'geographic' areas.

Here is my thinking - keen to have your comments and suggestions.

The purpose is to be able to send civiMail to people who have opted in to one or more of our 200+ issues - and to be able to differentiate geographically. For example, we may want to send an invite to a meeting with our MPs in one part of the country to those people who have signed up on Agriculture OR Animal Rights OR Health.

Since we have to use Mailing Lists for civiMail this means we need to have the possibility of civiMailing to each and every possible combination (200 x 200=40000).

Unless there is a better approach (eg give civiMail a miss) our goal is to set up the 200 Issues and approx 200 Geographies as separate Mailing Lists.

Then, if we want to only hit one city/electorate with the invitation we would
- add the Mailing List for Issue X
- exclude the Groups for areas we don't want to include (eg by selecting the 8 of the 9 provinces which are to be excluded, and then selecting any parts of the remaining province that also need to be excluded.

I think this is still onerous but can't think of a tidy way that would not involve a major redevelopment of the way we use civiMail - but maybe someone has a much tidier option.

I suspect in the next major revision of CiviMail we'll add the option of sending a mail to a group created dynamically (i.e. for just that mailing).

For now, i cant think of an easy way of accomplishing what pete wants to do with civimail 2.0/2.1 without it being a total PITA (pain in the a***). I'll sleep on it and maybe come up with something soon

lobo