Publicity

This is the main activity involved with preparing for a concert. This involves:

• Creating a concert poster, in various formats for both physical and on-line purposes
• Sending an email message to our longstanding email distribution list, announcing the concert, providing details, and encouraging attendance.

Concert Poster

[Our publicity chair has this well in hand. I will leave it to him to add details here.]

Sending the Announcement Email

Note

Our current way of doing this has its roots in the early history of SVC, before I, the webmaster, joined the chorus. Back in the mists of history, someone (two different people, I believe) set up Gmail accounts related to SVC: milfordchorus@gmail.com, and souheganvalleychorus@gmail.com . Note that neither of these accounts is within the souheganvalleychorus.org domain.

The Gmail account souheganvalleychorus@gmail.com is currently used for only one purpose: To send out email announcements for upcoming concerts. (It also appears that publicity-related messages are sent to this address – things like Milford Patch, event registrations at various publicity sites, etc.)

I have long felt the need to fix this, but the process is needed so infrequently, and the fix is rather complex and potentially has implications – work! – that I never got around to making those changes.

We should eventually eliminate the souheganvalleychorus@gmail.com Gmail account, and replace it with some kind of general newsletter approach. This could be something like MailChimp (they have a free option), or Constant Contact (no free options). Or, we could use a newsletter plugin for our WordPress website. Note that all these options carry a heavy marketing approach, which I have never felt comfortable about.

The Process

Log In

First, you need to log into the souheganvalleychorus@gmail.com account:

1. Point your browser window to https://mail.google.com/
2. Click on the icon/avatar in the upper right, and select “ + Add Another Account“
   (If you’ve done this before, you may find the souheganvalleychorus@gmail.com account in the existing accounts. In that case just click on that item in the list.)
3. On the “Sign in” page that comes up, enter souheganvalleychorus@gmail.com and then click on Next
4. The next page will prompt you for credentials (password, passkey, etc.). Enter the appropriate credentials. (If you don’t have the password, contact me.)
5. Finally, you should be in, at the account’s inbox.

Note that there are some example emails in the Drafts folder.

Sending the Emails

Now, to send the email messages. We currently send multiple email messages because we have several groups (like distribution lists), each containing many recipients, and we don’t want to exceed the number of recipients per single message.

1. Click on the “Compose” button.
2. In the New Message window that comes up, enter the contents of your message, with appropriate formatting.
3. Enter something like this in the Subject line:
   SAVE THE DATE!! Souhegan Valley Chorus’ Upcoming Spring Concert-May 9th, 2026
4. Double check that the email message contents and Subject line are correct.
5. Ready to send? Click on Bcc (not To: or Cc ! – we don’t our recipients to see other recipients’ email addresses)), and then on the Bcc line.
6. In the Bcc line, type ‘Gr’. You will see four Groups listed, Group 1, through Group 4. Select “Group 1“, and nothing else.
7. One final check, and them click on Send
8. Repeat steps 1 through 7 for Group 2, Group 3, and Group 4

You’re done – except for one minor task:

Removing No Longer Valid Email Addresses

You may find that, in response to your email addresses, you will receive “bounce” indications for some people whose addresses are no longer valid, no longer exist, etc. One example of a ‘bounce’ indicator is something like this:

If we don’t remove these email addresses, we will keep on getting these annoying ‘bounce’ responses.

In order to remove an email address from a Gmail group, you need to go to the account’s Contacts.

Here’s a YouTube video that shows you how: