|
| |
Electronic Distribution of Newsletters
We are now offering to our Internet-enabled members the option of receiving
electronically most of the documents we previously only posted. We hope
that as many of our members take advantage of this as possible, since we see
this as beneficial both to the Society as well as to members. It is emphasized
though that this service is only open to paid-up Saxifrage Society members.
What we will do if you opt in:
- The Magazine and other major publications will continue to be sent to you by letter post as before.
- All other Society mailings, primarily newsletters, though, will no longer be posted to you in hard copy
form, and, instead, they will be sent to a single email address of your choice.
It is then up to you whether you choose to save, print or delete these documents.
- All of these Society mailings will be also available to you on the World
Wide Web in a searchable archive for any future
reference. This makes it unnecessary to keep your own copies.
- At some stage we may also consider distributing a small number of commercial mailings, but
you can rest assured these will only be
directly Saxifrage related; for instance, a specialist Nursery's list of Saxifrages.
- We don't anticipate the number of mailings ever exceeding 10 in a year.
Why you should sign up:
- You always get the newsletters as soon as they are available.
- They are in a more convenient form.
- You are provided with an historical archive of newsletters.
- You aid the Society in a similar way to opting to pay by direct debits.
How the Society gains
- For a small Society like ours, postage and photocopying are major overheads. By saving money on
printing and postage in this
way we can use it more usefully on things like colour in the magazine, and to help fund future
books.
- We can continue to keep subscription rates low; these have not substantially increased since the Society's
inception.
- We can keep our members better informed, and can issue more mailings
without worrying about costs.
Please note
- You may only choose email or real mail, but not both.
- At any time you may, however, opt to revert to "snail-mail".
- We intend, however, to use Newsletter number 32 as a parallel with the
real mail to eliminate any possible problems.
- If you have problems receiving our electronic mailings we will be contactable by email
on saxsoc-owner@yahoogroups.com.
Technical details:
- Emails are sent as a plain text body, but the actual documents will be
attachments in Adobe Acrobat
(PDF) format. This is the Internet's most popular format for formatted
documents, and requires the free
Acrobat Reader software, readily available for no cost for all popular operating systems and platforms. This
software ensures that newsletters, when printed or viewed on-screen, will
look exactly like the hard copy.
- If you do not have the Adobe software click on this icon to visit the
download site:
- The PDF format is immune
from computer viruses.
- The file sizes are small: a typical Newsletter of 5 pages will be sent as
a file of about 40KB.
- Both the mailing list and newsletter archive will be maintained using a Yahoo
Group called SaxSoc, that members maintain themselves through email addresses and a web site.
- Note that this is
separate and different from the Saxifraga discussion group.
This separate group is open to both members and non-members for Saxifrage
related discussions, but
once set up, your single Yahoo ID can be used to access both, and incidentally
also qualifies you to subscribe to thousands of other such
groups.
- The SaxSoc group is configured so that subscribers may receive emails, but
not post them. This means only selected Society officers can generate
the emails.
How to sign up:
|
