Ward Mid-Week Communique - Use LDS mail?

[aircrandall]

Can an LDS.net email be made available for use of the mid-week communique to ward members? We are already getting ideas of setting up ward gmail accounts to send out the communique.

[russellhltn]

Currently, emails are only created for specific callings or jobs. I think stake presidents and maybe bishops get them, but that's about it.

[scgallafent]

The Church does not provide email addresses for individual units that could be used in this way.

If you set up a ward Gmail account, that means that someone has to maintain a list of contacts for the ward Gmail account and update that every time someone move into or out of the ward. Ignoring the question of whether or not that is appropriate (storing membership information in a non-Church system), keeping that up to date is going to require some work.

In our ward, the executive secretary uses the LCR Send a Message function to send a weekly email. There are a few members he manually removes from the list before he sends it, but that serves his needs otherwise.

[Aaron8]

Based on my career experience I know that emails that look plain and ugly with no modern formatting don't often get opened and especially don't get read. I agree that the most secure way and best policy for sending emails to the ward should be managed from the LCR tools and not from a third party like Gmail (or even something like MailChimp though not my suggestion). The problem is that emails from the LCR tools look kind of ugly. It would be great if there could be some modern formatting options built into the emails. Does anyone know if there is a solution like that in the works?

Especially with the change in Sunday schedule and the emphasis on using emails/bulletins to communicate ward announcements instead of the beginning of sacrament meeting, is there potential that the LCR email might be built out so it can produce a cleaner more modern looking email? Over the years most wards have a pretty standard looking sacrament program. It would be nice to have a way to create and email that digitally does the same thing.

[mevans]

Based on my career experience I know that emails that look plain and ugly with no modern formatting don't often get opened and especially don't get read. I agree that the most secure way and best policy for sending emails to the ward should be managed from the LCR tools and not from a third party like Gmail (or even something like MailChimp though not my suggestion). The problem is that emails from the LCR tools look kind of ugly. It would be great if there could be some modern formatting options built into the emails. Does anyone know if there is a solution like that in the works?

Especially with the change in Sunday schedule and the emphasis on using emails/bulletins to communicate ward announcements instead of the beginning of sacrament meeting, is there potential that the LCR email might be built out so it can produce a cleaner more modern looking email? Over the years most wards have a pretty standard looking sacrament program. It would be nice to have a way to create and email that digitally does the same thing.

Send a Message does have some basic formatting options. If you search in the Leader and Clerk Resources forum, there are some posts about people creating HTML emails with Send a Message. I remember some people wondering if they had blocked entering HTML in Send a Message, so it may no longer work.

If you get into formatting options beyond the basics, you're going to run into issues with how various email clients interpret the formatting, and that can be a technical challenge to get it to work properly. Also, several formatted emails you receive download images to make the email formatting fancy. That's going to be a skill well beyond people in many units. Furthermore, certain email clients block image loading by default because it's a tool that marketers use to track if you opened the email (if you download the image, they know you read opened it). Those emails don't look great unless you let the images load.