We have gotten 550 people from Boston loaded on to JainLink and membership conversion for them is coming along nicely.

The following was the bulk email we had sent to them.

Step 1:  export your member names, emails, and addresses on to the excel spreadsheet;

Step 2:  continue populating your site with more and more content

Step 3:  import your members to JainLink

Step 3A: put this in your newsletter (if timeline permits)

Step 4:  send a bulk email out to them

Step 5:  follow up with a second request to sign on after a 1 week

Step 6: send out newsletter to both members and non-members

  *****************

Jai Jinendra @@FIRST_NAME@@,

You and your family members are invited to join JainLink on-line community.  Please visit www.JainLink.org and register.

This Jain on-line community has been developed in collaboration with JAINA, Jain Centers, YJA, YJP, and many other Jain organizations. 

Here you can network with other members, stay up-to-date with news, find out about upcoming events, visit your group home pages, submit notes and photos, maintain your personal profile page, and much more!

Thank you.
Jai Jinendra

Chandrakant Vora
Yogendra Jain

  *******  Template to export current member list *****************

https://jaina.yourmembership.com/admin/ix/templates.asp

please visit here to get templates.  You can get member templates if we agree that we would like to make the people in the database members. If not, then use the non-member template and this will require all of them to register and become members (many will not go through the trouble).  Feel free to keep many of the fields depopulated.  Chandra can help you add more custom fields.

Also in parallel - we should be thinking about what kind of content we would like to add to this, how we should organize it etc.  Ideally - when you have completed the database, the content is ready as well, and we can get send out bulk emails, newsletters, etc.

It would be good to put an email together on the overall strategy for content.