If you don't find the answer to your question here, call 415.561.7807 or email support@groundspring.org.

• How can EmailNow help me raise money online?
• What types of email messages does EmailNow support?
• How many email addresses can I store in EmailNow?
• Does my organization have to be a 501c3 nonprofit to use EmailNow?
• How does EmailNow integrate with DonateNow?
• Can people sign up to be added to receive emails from my web site?
• With EmailNow, can our organization send out emails to different people for different reasons at different times?
• Can I export my list of email addresses into my in-house donor management software?
• Do I need to use any special software to use EmailNow?
• Is there a way to see what the email message will look like before I send it out to our entire email list?
• What kinds of reporting tools are there to determine the response to the email we send out?
• Should our nonprofit worry about being accused of sending spam when we use EmailNow?
• Are the email addresses that I store in EmailNow secure?
• How does EmailNow handle all those emails that bounce back when we send email broadcasts?
• Why should I use EmailNow instead of Microsoft Outlook, Eudora or any other email software program installed on my personal computer?
• How is EmailNow different from the free services that Topica.com or Yahoo Groups offer?

EmailNow is designed to help nonprofits raise money online by opening up a direct channel of regular email communications. Sending email to your supporters and constituents is one of the most effective ways to build relationships, keep interested people informed, and drive traffic to your web site. Without email, you're depending on people remembering to visit and revisit your web site. Of course, to send email, you have to have email addresses! So a critical piece to make EmailNow help you raise money online is to collect email addresses from your supporters, donors and friends.

You can use EmailNow to send several email message types, including plain text and HTML. Traditionally, most email has been sent using plain text. More recently, nonprofits (and companies) have begun using HTML formatted emails to add logos, fonts, colors and other formatting to messages.

There is no limit to the number of email addresses that you can store in EmailNow. The pricing for EmailNow is based on the number of emails you send per month.

Groundspring.org's services are designed to be used primarily by nonprofits, but that is not a requirement to use our service.

Combined together, DonateNow and EmailNow allow a nonprofit to create an online fundraising campaign, send email appeals to supporters, and drive traffic to your web site where credit card contributions can be collected. Tracking between DonateNow and EmailNow is seamless, so you can track how many donations are collected as a result of an email fundraising campaign.

You can integrate EmailNow directly into your web site, by adding a signup form onto any of your web pages. This way, a visitor to your site can quickly and easily opt-in to subscribe to your eNewsletter or request email updates about your projects and campaigns. Once they sign up, their email address is automatically added to your list in EmailNow.

Yes, nonprofits can create subsets of email addresses for specific campaigns and other purposes. You can also schedule emails to be sent at a later time or date. Subsets can be created based on any stored criteria, such as city, state, zip code, etc., and can be made public, private, password protected, or closed.

You can export any of your EmailNow lists at any time. EmailNow is designed to export email addresses in tab separated format, which can then be imported into other software programs such as Microsoft Excel or other donor databases.

To use EmailNow as a nonprofit customer, you must use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and up, and Netscape Navigator 6 and up. If necessary, please upgrade your browser to use the service.

> Upgrade Microsoft Internet Explorer
> Upgrade Netscape Navigator

Yes, you can send test messages to verify formatting and content before you send your "real" email. In fact, we strongly recommend that you do this for every message that you send.

Customers have access to complete delivery statistics for every email campaign. You can also track the number of recipients that click-through on hypertext links in the body of a message. For customers that also use Groundspring's DonateNow credit card processing service, EmailNow tracks online gifts that are generated as a result of email broadcasts. Reports can be downloaded from the "My Account" area of your EmailNow account.

We strongly recommend that nonprofits adopt the strictest policies for adding subscribers to your EmailNow lists. It is important that no-one ever be added to your lists without their explicit opt-in permission. If you have a subscription form on your website, individuals will opt-in themselves to join your list. The EmailNow service will send a confirmation email to that individual to confirm that they're being added to your list. This confirmation email is called "double opt-in" and will ensure that individuals are fully informed about joining your list. If you plan to upload a list of email addresses from another service or from another source, it is important that you are able to verify that all those email addresses are from individuals that have opted-in to receive email updates from you. If you don't verify their opt-in permission, and individuals are added to your list without their explicit permission, you will be accused of sending spam. Spamming accusations will impact both your nonprofit agency and also Groundspring.org. We greatly appreciate your thoroughness and ethical practices when using the EmailNow service to send broadcast emails to large numbers of individuals.

The email addresses that you store in EmailNow are absolutely secure and are your exclusive property. Unlike some for-profit services, we don't send product solicitations or include intrusive advertising with messages. We've taken great care and spared no expense to build and deploy the most state-of-art computer hardware and software systems to ensure security and privacy.

EmailNow is designed to automatically handle invalid email addresses. You can access a report that shows how many bounce-backs have occurred for a given campaign, and can choose to remove those bad email addresses from your list for future campaigns.

EmailNow gives you more options for managing your email lists, and gives your email recipients more control over subscribing and unsubscribing to your list. It also allows you to automatically clean up invalid email addresses and remove duplicates. EmailNow can be seamlessly integrated into your website, and allows you to track statistics such click-throughs on hypertext links. All of these items are either difficult or impossible to do with email software programs.

EmailNow is offered as an affordable and ad-free alternative to for-profit services. Nonprofits are increasingly dissatisfied with the free services that are available that include intrusive advertising and vague privacy policies. EmailNow is priced affordably for nonprofits, is advertising free, and has clear and firm privacy policies.