From the desk of the webmaster (but under the direction of the Secretary!)

Mailchimp is a service that we're planning to adopt to help with managing and sending the Choir emails and newsletters. The emails and newsletters will still be clearly identified as coming from the Choir, with minimal association with Mailchimp as a service provider.

As you will know we have to be very careful with the email addresses that you've shared with us, and this will continue to be true when Mailchimp is fully adopted. 

You can read all about Mailchimp's Privacy Policy here, but to summarise the important bit, they say...

We do not, under any circumstances, steal your lists, contact people on your lists, market to people on your lists, sell your lists, or share your lists with any other party, except as required by law or, regarding contacting, except in response to a complaint or other communication directly from an individual on one of your lists.

We will be building our Mailchimp lists from the ones we already have. A nice feature of Mailchimp is that you can manage your own subscriptions - for example, changing the address which receives the choir emails. In the emails you receive via Mailchimp will be links to allow you to unsubscribe or change the address (these links will be to the Mailchimp site, so may not have the SPC purple theme, until I find out whether I can theme these pages too).

This should improve the reliability of delivery of Choir emails and newsletters - Deborah has had to maintain multiple short distribution lists covering the 170-odd recipients due to the anti-spam policies of the various Internet Service Providers, and even then it's a moving target as to whether they get through.  With Mailchimp we hope that this will be a thing of the past.

If you have any concerns with this change please don't hesitate to get in touch with Deborah - details on the Contact Us page.

You could even see if your email address is already there...