The next meeting of the mass e-mail user group is May 15 from 2-3:30 in Morrill Hall room 238A.

The main presentation will be given by Christina Morgan, E-Communications Specialist for the University of Minnesota Foundation. She will be presenting on the use of conditional scripting in Lyris ListManager. She writes:

"We had a situation where we made good use of conditional scripting to merge additional fields and messages into the email only if certain conditions had been met. The presentation is geared toward users who maintain their own lists (i.e. don’t solely email to gel and gil segments), and who are interested in taking advantage of one of Lyris’ more advanced features."

For those of you not familiar with the 'GEL' and 'GIL' acronyms she mentions, these stand for "global external list" and "global internal list," which are list segments in Lyris that contain alumni, donors, and friends of the University (GEL) or staff and students (GIL).

This presentation will be more technical than most, but don't let that phase you, there's a communications angle to this, as well. It's trivial to personalize messages by merging, such as the recipient's first name into the greeting, but this presentation will address how to customize messages using demographic and other data.

For more information, including how users on coordinate campuses can attend, see the Mass E-mail User Group Web page.