[Removing Old Members and/or Unsubscribe Button]

I have a problem that may have multiple solutions. Essentially, we need to be able to send marketing emails (upcoming tryouts, merchandise sales, etc) to ACTIVE members of our site (those who currently or have recently played with us). Unfortunately we have hundreds, maybe thousands, of people on our site who have't been with us for years. We have 8000 members on our site (I'm sure a ton are duplicates or originally loaded members back when SE would help you do that). When we send a marketing email, we get a ton of 'MY KID HASN'T PLAYED HERE IN 5 YEARS PLEASE REMOVE ME ASAP'. Literally dozens of those emails. 

 

Now, a major issue is the lack of an unsubscribe button at the bottom of emails. These days, SE requires people to log in. People don't want to have to log in to change their email preferences...and so they reply and yell at us instead. 

 

Now when they yell at us, we don't have a great way to quickly remove people - we must go into the permissions screen for each member of their family and remove from site. It's a hassle that would be resolved with the inclusion of an unsubscribe button. 

 

Finally, I am familiar with smart groups, but I'm curious if SE support would be able to build me a smart group (or include this in the site setup) where we can email a smart group that includes everyone who registered for ANYTHING on our site for the last X number of years. We have dozens of registrations any given year so managing that manually is difficult. A preset smart group would be a rolling smart group, where older members would fall off and we wouldn't be emailing people from 2017 tryouts for 2022. 

 

Not sure how active this forum is anymore...but are there solutions I'm overlooking?

[Parents emailing entire team?]

@mikekaz - could you set it up where the parents are guardians of the kids? I believe that would give them the ability to interact with the team through the mobile app. 

[Parents emailing entire team?]

Yeah, it was not ideal, but I feel like parents lose their mind over lots of things, and so I'm happy more of them don't know this option exists, and that this was an honest mistake versus something more sinister. I do think this opens the door for parents to "vent" to everyone on the team, which I'd want to squash if I could. Only a matter of time before that happens, haha.

 

My thoughts:

 

-I do like parents being able to email a coach ("we can't make it friday but we'll be there saturday", or "timmy's birthday is friday we'll bring cupcakes"), or another parent ("timmy needs a ride"), but maybe just limit the ability to email the 'Email Team and Staff' list? That feels clunky but would have stopped this one in its tracks. Coaches and site admins would be able to email everyone. 

 

-That said, the 1:1 chat would allow them to ping the coach (assuming they have the app installed...whole other topic, haha, but probably relevant here) and the other parent, but would still limit their ability to contact everyone. 

 

Entirely possible that this parent could have done what he did within the chat feature...but I guess just having it in the email gave it a little more weight, helped along by the fact that it had our organizational banner at the top, which is ALWAYS (until now) an official org message. This time, though, it looked like an org message but was not. 

 

 

[Parents emailing entire team?]

Yesterday we had a parent (not a coach, not any sort of site admin) email our entire team. The issue? He took it upon himself to tell everyone the address for a game, but he was wrong. The correct address was already in the calendar entry. Fun times. 

 

I had no idea parents could email the entire team like that from the mobile app. Is there a way to disable that? Figure if parents want to talk they could just use the chat feature, but this particular email came through with the organizational banner, and really looked like it came from a coach/admin. 

[Anyone running a blog on an SE site?]

We're thinking about adding a blog to our new SportsEngine site (yet to be launched). Obviously we could partially replicate it just using a text box element, but you lose the blog functionality of directly linking to a post. Is there a plugin that would work for SE, or some other way anyone can think of to run a blog? 

 

Thanks all.