Meltdown

After three days in bed, I needed to make an Olympic effort to get caught up with Preventable Surprises. We are trying to do an e-mail campaign to about 200 supporters asking them to take a survey (on which sector should we focus during next year’s AGM season?) and inviting them to participate in an online dialogue in about a month’s time.

As I noted in Process Princess, Raj and Carolyn need a techie person because neither of them are much good with technology. At Vanguard, with 14,000 employees, there were teams that managed e-mail subscriber lists, teams that managed e-mail marketing campaigns, teams that edited, teams that wrote, teams that updated the website. At Preventable Surprises, I’m all of those teams. Specialisation doesn’t work when there are three employees.

I am having a devil of a time learning how to navigate Mailchimp, an e-mail campaign database. It would help if there were a page explaining the difference between a list, a group, a segment, a campaign, and how each of these relates to the other. With David’s help (“jolly good of your husband to put his shoulder to the wheel as well” Carolyn said), I’ve exported 2,000 e-mails into a zip file, created an excel workbook and sorted them six ways to Sunday. I think I’ve created a Mailchimp segment using lists from two prior campaigns. And I’ve added a dozen or so names that came from a spreadsheet external to Mailchimp.

We want to send two attachments, which you can’t do in Mailchimp. I’m supposed to learn how to create links to the attachments on Preventable Surprises’ website. Since I’m overwhelmed by other PS tasks, I’ve delegated that job to our intern. Yes, we have an unpaid intern--a young student who applied for my job and had the grace to volunteer when she didn’t get it. I (stereotypically) assume that b/c she’s in her early 20s, she can figure out how to create the links (preferably hidden) on our site and how to design a survey in SurveyMonkey and send me a link for that. As it is, I had a meltdown today (Wednesday) when I lost a workbook that I didn’t save correctly and when I couldn’t figure out how to navigate in Mailchimp. Without Cristina, I would surely be lost.

As resistant as I’ve been to learning techie tricks, I am mostly bearing up well. I’ve figured out it isn’t enough to be a writer in 2016. If you want to get a job, you’d better be fluent as an owner or administrator of Wordpress, Twitter, Mailchimp, google shared drives, etc. While this stuff doesn’t come naturally to me, it is a tremendous boost to my confidence when I figure something out on my own, which I occasionally do. It does help, however, to be married to a software programmer/systems architect kind of guy.
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