Announcing Two CiviCRM User Trainings

I’m really excited to announce that I will be running two CiviCRM user trainings in September and October.  Back in March and April I was involved in two similar trainings, one with Dave Greenberg from CiviCRM at the NTC, and the other during the workshop day before DrupalCon in San Francisco.  The feedback from both trainings was really positive.  In talking to people I found that there was plenty of interest in attending similar trainings.  So we’ve decided to offer two trainings this fall, and will be adding more in the coming months.  The trainings are squarely focused on people who are interested in learning how to configure and use CiviCRM. It is not a training designed for developers who are interested really digging in to the code, CiviCRM is offering trainings of that nature.  The training will start with an introduction to basic CiviCRM concepts and configuration and then take a tour through real world examples of how you can use CiviCRM’s many advanced features like CiviMail, CiviContribute and CiviMember.  We are running an early-bird special until September 10th for the Seattle training, and until October 7th for the Berkeley training. Until then registration is $325 for individuals and corporations, and $295 for nonprofit organizations. After that the registration will go up to $395/$345.  Lunch will be available for $15. Learn more and register...

Looking For An Email Service Provider? Groundwire Sizes Up The Options

We often hear the question, “What email service provider do you recommend?” from clients, prospective clients, or even just friends.  For those using CiviCRM we recommend using the built in CiviMail in conjunction with an SMTP service like CiviSMTP to handle deliverability issues.  But for those not using CiviCRM the answer is always a tricky one to arrive upon because there are so many different variables to consider: volume, pricing, east of use, reporting, and on and on. So it is with great excitement that I sat down to review the recently released Email Service Provider Comparison Report 2010 from the good folks (literally down the street from me) at Groundwire.  The report is a pretty extensive roundup of many popular email service providers including ConstantContact, MailChimp, VerticalResponse, CampaignMonitor (I love their templates and other resources), and a few others. If you are in the market for an email service provider for email marketing or other mass email, I strongly recommend that you download a copy of the report and read...