Submitted by Megan on August 18, 2014 - 11:37am

At Richir Outreach, we build websites for various organizations, including political campaigns. A task involved in political campaigning might be to send email blasts, or eBlasts for various outreach purposes, fundraising, trying to recruit volunteers, etc. Eblasts are a useful and effective marketing tool for an organization desiring communication with their entire contact database or just a large group of people. NGP has a great reputation on the market for creating products that are useful to political campaigns, specifically their email blast software. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how one would deliver an eBlast assuming an account is created, with a contact list.
- Login to NGP at https://www2.myngp.com/
- Click on Send Emails & Fundraise-this is located on the right view of front page.
- Click on Create and Send an email message-this is a link on the left side of the screen.
- Click to create a NEW email.
- existing saved emails will be on right side in yellow under name saved under. - Broadcast Email window pops up- give it a name. The name is for internal purposes, when the email is sent, the email name will not be visible to readers/recipients
- Step 1: Set up > Create Your Message
- Fill out fields accordingly.
- Sender - is who you are sending it from (organization name, politician name and so on.
- Remember to include the subject line.
- Add Your Email Content.
- In HTML Version, Press enter a few times then copy and paste or just type in the content for the email.
- Make sure everything is aligned and spaced out to your preferences.
- Leave the {Disclaimer} {Organization Address} in the brackets alone, those will be filled out when personalized fields are merged.
- To add a hyperlink in -(there is a button in the text editor options that does this), the link just has to be pasted in the Plain Text Version.
- Click Personalize by Inserting a Merge Field.
- Click First Name, and put something like "Friend" or "Neighbor" - it will default to this name, if there is no first name in the system.
- When done with filling out the content fields and putting the hyperlink in HTML version and URL in Plaintext version click Continue.
- Step 2: Recipients, click General.
- Step 3: Review and Set Delivery Options.
- Start by sending a sample email, to make sure everything looks right and the links work.
- Then, make sure everything is present, because this is where you can get flagged down for something such as no subject line.
- Check to agree to terms and services and send email or send email at scheduled time.
- Sending a Sample- just click send a sample, and add the email addresses you would like to send the sample to.