Parent Email Lists

This Tech Tip will look into creating parent email lists. At Gull Lake we use GroupWise for our main email. Let’s face it, making, editing, and maintaining email group lists is nothing short of difficult, confusing, and often will not work from the web based version of GroupWise. There is an easy, yet short way to do a work-around. Create these parent email lists outside the GroupWise address book.

Parent Email Lists:

If you are like me, you want to send parents updates, newsletters, and other information easily. Parent email groups are great for this, but setting them up can be very time consuming (especially using GroupWise). In order to create email groups in GroupWise you must: 

1. Open GroupWise and Address Book 
2. Create a new group 
3. Manually enter in all your parent contacts 
4. Attach new contacts to the list 
5. …and not be using the “online” version that does not seem to like finding your set up groups (this seems to be hit or miss) 
6. Then delete these at the end of the year and start all over again 

There is, in my opinion, an easier way to do this. All you need is Microsoft Word or Google Drive and a list of all your contacts. The advantage to using Google Drive is that this list will be available wherever you are by logging into your Apps account. For those using Dropbox, Microsoft Word will work the same way.

Here is what to do:

1. Ask parents to give you their email address. I use Google Forms for this. 
2. Open up a word processor program (Word, Google Drive, Pages, etc…). 
3. Make a listing of all those parent contacts in the document (make sure to put a “,” after each contact). I make the first list all parents, then copy that list and make more for parties, newsletters, etc. I just delete from any parents that don’t need to be on that particular list. 
4. Create a new email message. 
5. When you are ready to send it to the list of parents, copy the correct list from your document. 
6. This is important: paste the copied list into the BC (Blind Copy) box. This is important as it hides parent email information for being viewed by others (privacy Issues).