When the Child & Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF) Web site debuted in January of 2000 at www.bpkids.org, thousands of people visited , seeking more information about the various bipolar disorders that affect up to 6 percent of the adolescent and adult population. As one of the first virtual non-profit organizations, CABF needed to find creative ways on-line to provide value to its membership. An electronically distributed newsletter that provided the latest research, articles by famous scientists, news about important conferences and links to other Internet sites was an obvious choice. Using its Intranet, CABF distributed a text-only e-mail newsletter to members, but with its small staff and volunteers scattered across the country, the organization didn’t have the resources to create an HTML version, nor the means to distribute it electronically.
 
iMakeNews Makes It So Easy

After researching application service providers, CABF found iMakeNews.com e-newsletter services to be the best looking, easy-to-use and cost effective solution for their eBulletin. CABF began publishing its eBulletin using iMakeNews’ offsite service in September of 2000. Since then, the newsletter has been distributed bi-monthly to an e-mail member-subscriber list that has grown to over 5,000.
 
Sissy Brunk, CABF’s communications director and responsible for creating and distributing the eBulletin, said, “iMakeNews makes it so easy. When you set up an account, they help you create a template. From then on, it’s all spelled out. We import articles from Microsoft Word documents or e-mail, and the service puts it into HTML. If I get stuck, I e-mail or call our support person and he walks me through the problem.” Brunk particularly enjoys the program’s editor feature that allows her to change the appearance and order of the articles as she assembles the material. “You make a change, hit the preview button and see the results immediately. It’s a very user-friendly program.”
 
“iMakeNews also has accommodated AOL members who can’t read the eBulletin in HTML,” Brunk said, “by automatically sensing and issuing a simple plain text version of the eBulletin and mailing it to the separated-out AOL membership list.”
 
What Works, What Doesn’t – All is Revealed in the Activity Report

 

Whenever a new eBulletin is distributed, iMakeNews provides a detailed activity report that allows CABF to:
·     View statistics on which articles and links are most popular and which articles get forwarded to others
·     Use anonymous polls to obtain statistics about subscribers’ interests
·      Download report data into an Excel spreadsheet

The activity report gives Brunk the opportunity to fine-tune the eBulletin. Discoveries in the bipolar field, or articles by well-known doctors or scientists, are extremely popular, Brunk learned, and should be put at the top of the newsletter, whereas CABF’s business news is of lesser interest and can be put toward the end. The iMakeNews activity report can be viewed on-line or downloaded as a spreadsheet and imported into a database program. “This is a very nice feature,” Brunk said. “You can compare from month to month and read it either on the computer or in hardcopy form.”

“iMakeNews has the best program I’ve seen for managing a subscriber list,” Brunk says. “You can add people one at a time or 5,000 at a time. Their bounce manager step identifies bad addresses and gives us the option of correcting or removing them. The opt-out program allows us to ‘remember’ or ‘forget’ who’s asked to be removed from the list. Since we can’t duplicate their services in-house, we regularly upload our constantly changing membership list to their site to have it cleaned. ”

In addition to the eBulletin, CABF mails out bulk e-mail alerts several times a month, informing members of time-sensitive legislation and items of interest appearing on the Web site. “I can run our mailing list through the iMakeNews’ bounce management system and instantly have a perfectly clean list, and in the next minute broadcast an e-mail alert,” Brunk explained. “And depending on the subject, the alert can go to the entire list or to a sub-list.”
The Bottom Line: The CABF eBulletin Fuels Membership Growth
 
Since its founding in July 1999, CABF has grown from a small on-line community of about 250 to more than 4,000 members. One of the things that makes CABF membership so worthwhile is the CABF eBulletin. “Every time we issue a new eBulletin, we get an overwhelmingly positive e-mail response,” Brunk said.
 

For more information about the symptons and treatment of bipolar disorder in children, visit www.bpkids.org.