Making Music Platform allows you to send out regular newsletter bulletins to either your members or your friends/supporters - via the mailing lists system. These newsletters have the following features...
- They are attractive, using your existing "branded" email template, with your own colour scheme and logo
- They are primarily constructed from existing news items and events on your website. You "assemble" a newsletter from existing news items and events, rather than create the newsletter from scratch. You are also able to add extra custom text/images to each newsletter if you want, but generally, this is not necessary.
- Assembly of a new newsletter is easy and user-friendly. You can even drag-and-drop the articles in your newsletter into the correct order.
- A table of contents (with links) will be added to the top of the newsletter automatically
- There is a simple, working unsubscribe system for your friends/supporters
Before you create a newsletter
As mentioned above, each newsletter is "assembled" from existing news items (or any other Bulletin Board items) and events (plus other ad hoc text). This means that before you create the newsletter, the news items and events must already exist on your website. You're likely already familiar with creating events. In case you don't know how to create a news item, they are simply entries on the "Bulletin Board".
Strong recommendation: To make your newsletter as attractive as possible, each news item and each event should have an associated "image", which will show on the newsletter. The newsletter will still work if the items on the newsletter don't have images, but it will look a lot better if they do.
Images should be sensibly sized!! Digital photos straight out of the camera will be around 3000 pixels wide and will be around 3 Megabytes - entirely unsuitable for an email newsletter. Before adding your images, resize them to around 300 - 500 pixels wide. And "portrait" images will generally look better than "landscape" images.
To add an image to a news item, update the news item and find the following field...
To add an image to an event, update the event, click the Public tab, and find the following field...
Also, if you're planning to send the newsletter to your group's friends/supporters, then you will probably also want to ensure that each news item or event you're planning to include in the newsletter is set to Public access.
