What the Guild uses online

Here’s a few of the major online tools the Guild uses regularly.

Constant Contact – for anyone sending email newsletters to more than 100 people, you really need a third party email solution and the one the Guild uses is Constant Contact. You can upload your patrons’ emails easily and select from hundreds of templates to design your emails. It also makes it easy to schedule all of your month’s email blasts at once. And if you’re interested, just ask me for a $30 referral email. Once you have that email you get a 60 day free trial AND if you sign-up you’ll get $30 off your first year (and the Guild gets a $30 credit).

Google Docs – over the last couple years we’ve used Google docs for spreadsheets that can be shared among many people. I’ve mentioned this a couple times as a great way to build a mailing list amongst a group or Guild chapter. One person sets up the file and then shares it to many people. Each person can then access the file at anytime and enter names and addresses. Its a great way of splitting up a massive data entry job such as keying addresses of people who attend a craft show.

Flickr – I’m a huge fan of the ease of using Flickr. Uploading images is extremely simple and sorting and tagging images into sets is just as easy. There’s a giveaway going on right now at HandmadeinPa.net for a Flickr Pro account. The Pro account gives you unlimited uploads. Without the Pro account you can still upload 100 Mb of images in one month – not shabby for most people’s needs. A chapter or a group may need more than that, but Pro is only $25/year.

Hotcards – this is the company we get nearly all of our postcards printed with. The quality is excellent and for anything you need in bulk (2000 or more postcards) they also have the best price. Other printers you can choose from online: 48 Hour Print and VistaPrint.

I’ll try to make this is frequent post. This is really just the start of many more.