Contact management

Your Main Street Sites website will allow you to maintain a list of contacts for your center, and send periodic newsletters to your families. People visiting your site can sign up for the newsletter themselves or you can add them to the list yourself.

This is an example of what visitors to your site will see on your home page if you enable this option:

 Managing Contacts

Before you can send out any newsletters, you will need to build up a list of contacts. Ideally some of your families will sign themselves up for your newsletter on your site, but even so you will likely want to add some names and addresses yourself.

To access this feature, locate the "Manage Contacts" option in the main menu.

This page consists of a set of search fields and a list of contacts below it. The page will always be blank when you first load it. Click on the "GO" button to display your full list of contacts. If you like, you can enter a name in the first or last name fields before clicking on "GO" to narrow down the list. You can also search for only active or inactive contacts (deactivated contacts are still in the list but will not receive any newsletters you send).

This is what the grid looks like:

This is an example of using the search fields. By entering the first name "John," only contacts with first names beginning with "John" are displayed.

To add a new contact, click on the "Add New Contact" link shown below.

You will be presented with a form to fill out. Enter the contacts name and email address and click on the "Add" button. If you would like to deactivate an existing contact (that is - keep the contact information but prevent any newsletters from being sent to this person), you can click on the "Deactivated" checkbox.

Whenever necessary, you can click on the "Edit" link to edit a contact, the "Delete" link to delete a contact or the "Deactivate" link to deactivate a contact.

Managing Newsletters

Once you have built up a list of contacts, you can choose to send out a newsletter to all the active contacts in your list. The newsletter will be sent via email.

You can begin this process by selecting "Manage Newsletters" from the main menu.

You will be shown a list of your newsletters. The list will be empty if you haven't yet created any newsletters. The example below shows the list with a single newsletter.

Click on the "Add a Newsletter" link to create a new newsletter.

Enter the title of your newsletter in the "Subject" field (this will be the subject line of the email that will contain your newsletter). Type the rest of your newsletter into the large input area labelled "Body." This will be the body of the newletter email. Click on the "Add" button to save you newsletter. If you are creating a long newsletter, it would be a good idea to save your work every few minutes.

This example shows what a very simple newsletter might look like.

If you want to edit or delete an existing newsletter, just click on the "Edit" or "Delete" links as shown here.

When you are ready to send your newsletter, just click on the "Send" link. Your newsletter will be sent to all of your active contacts.