GovDelivery

Onboarding Meeting: This meeting serves to introduce you to your support team, discuss the onboarding process for sending your first bulletin, and give you a tour of using GovDelivery. It's part info session, part training, and part Q&A. 

Pre-Send Check-In: This is an optional meeting where you can ask any questions you have, get help with anything in GovDelivery you need help with, and just give a general check before you send your first bulletin. 

Follow-Up Meeting: This meeting happens after you've sent your first bulletin. We will look at analytics, talk about any challenges you may have faced, and make sure you're ready to send future bulletins. 

Document Review: About a week before you want to send your first bulletin, you'll send Mel a Word doc with the contents of your bulletin. She will review for plain language, Section 508 compliance, and give you tips to improve the newsletter and better reach your audience.

Create Your Bulletin: Once your content is finalized, you'll transfer the information into GovDelivery and format it how you like. At this stage, you'll include images, add links, and format your text. 

Preview and Test: After your bulletin is formatted, send yourself (and Mel) a test copy. This is where you will proofread the bulletin again, make sure links work, and check that it's formatted how you want. Mel will review it as well! 

Send It: If you're satisfied with how your bulletin looks and functions, you're ready to schedule it to send! Choose your audience and schedule it to send! That's it. You're done! Congrats!

Bulletins are the format and template that GovDelivery uses to send out an issue of an email newsletter. Bulletins are multi-channel messages that automatically deliver web, RSS, or other content across email, mobile, and social channels.  

Newsletters are marketing and/or communications tools. Newsletters are used to periodically send content that inform your audience of the latest news, tips, or updates. These updates are timely and are often out-of-date by the next newsletter.  

Subscribers are individual lists of people who have specifically chosen to receive information about that issue. Each subscriber may sign up for multiple newsletters that interests them. The subscriber may customize and manage their subscription profile in order to receive exactly the types of information they desire, and they may cancel their subscriptions at any time.  

Topics are used to organize your information in GovDelivery. Topics can be listed, unlisted, or restricted. 

Topic Administrators are the users responsible for day-to-day maintenance of a newsletter/topic/content in GovDelivery. Primary tasks for administrators include writing and sending newsletters to subscribers. Additional tasks are analyzing and reporting metrics. 

Backup Topic Administrators are an agency representative who serves as a backup to the topic administrator as needed.