Email Forwarding
If you have your own domain name for your website, it is easy to set up email forwarding to a private email account so that mail sent to warden@midsomerbaptist.org.uk is automatically forwarded to peterpiper@gmail.com. This means you can show a contact address on your website without revealing the private email account.
Email forwarding is normally set up in your domain control panel.
Group Emails
You have a group of people who all need to communicate by email. It sounds simple enough until you forget to include one person. Or someone changes their email address but not everyone has updated their address book. Or someone forgets to reply-all. Fortunately there is an easy solution to this – email discussion groups. First you create one central group containing all the email addresses. Then anyone in the group can send an email to the group address and it is sent out automatically to everyone on the list. No more forgetting Fred, and no need to reply-all. And if someone changes address you only have one place to update to ensure that communication keeps flowing.
One such system which you can use for free is Google Groups.
Email Accounts for Charities
Whilst free email accounts or email forwarding is perfectly adequate in most cases, a larger organisation can benefit from having managed email accounts for their domain. This gives you separate email accounts on your domain name, e.g. vicar@midsomerbaptist.org.uk, secretary@midsomerbaptist.org.uk. You can also run discussion groups using your domain name, e.g. news@midsomerbaptist.org.uk, and set up email forwarding to private addressses, e.g. warden@midsomerbaptist.org.uk forwards to peterpiper@example.com.
Google offers its G-Suite business suite for free to registered charities as G-Suite for Non-Profits. Even if you are just one part of a larger charity e.g. Church in Wales you can still sign up for this.
If you prefer to avoid Google, there is also a free offering from Zoho for up to 5 users (webmail only), or for a small monthly fee you can upgrade to a service which works with desktop email clients such as Outlook and as many users as you need.
Publicity Emails
If you would like to send out a mailshot to publicise an event, product or service, you need more than plain text to make it look good. But as with websites, what looks good in your desktop email client can look terrible on a mobile phone screen. This is where email marketing software comes into its own, giving you all the tools to design professional looking emails that look good on any device.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to sign up for a free account with Mailchimp. This allows you to design good-looking publicity email campaigns and send them to up to 2000 subscribers for free. You can also check up on who opened the email to see how well your campaign is doing.
Do bear in mind that you can only sign people up with their permission as sending publicity/marketing/fundraising emails without is illegal in the UK and EU.