As of 4:30pm Pacific time on Jan 11th, there have been 195 responses to the survey and 78 subscribers to the newsletter.
So far, in the survey, there have been some thought provoking comments and questions. This following Q&A will address the ones that many of you will find informative.
Q) Not really a question, but some of you weren’t clear about the $15 I mentioned.
A) There is NO fee for you to pay for anything regarding the website, newsletter, or blog. There was a charge that I paid to be able to send the survey out to 1620 people.
Q) What are “Splinters” and “Branches”?
A) BassettBranches(.org) is the name of the website itself. It is the name I came up with when first moving from a subdirectory of my own personal site (Bassett.net) to having a domain specifically for the Bassett Family Association. I thought it was a good name since there are many branches of Bassett families. Jeff agreed it was a good name, and thus the website was born. Years ago, I belonged to a genealogy society. They called the board of directors minutes “Splinters From the Board”. I thought that was catchy, and that it would make a good name for a newsletter. But since the newsletter isn’t from a board of directors, the name of the newsletter became “Splinters From the Tree”, the tree being the Bassett family tree.
Q) What is a blog, and how does it differ from the newsletter? I’m not sure how to read a blog.
A) Blog is a truncation of the expression web log. It is just a different way of publishing the newsletter.
http://bassettbranches.org/newsletters/2013/12/201312.shtml is the entire Dec 2013 newsletter.
https://www.bassettbranches.org/newsblog has individual entries for each article.
Both are archived. You do not have to keep emails to see them. From the main page of the website http://www.bassettbranches.org, there are two menu items “Splinters From The Tree (Blog)” and Splinters From The Tree (Pre2014 Archive). I previously mentioned an RSS reader for reading the blog. You do NOT have to read it that way, you can just click on that blog menu item. Both methods are searchable.
Q) I’m quoting this comment – IF I sign up on my regular email address that you have been sending my Bassett Genealogy Newsletter, I will be signing up with 1620 more addresses, I presume. Those people will have my address, too. I don’t want to have people using my email address to fill up my email box that is already too full. I’m happy to have you use it, but not the whole Bassett Family.
A) No, that is not the case. The only people with access to your address are Jeff and I, and we already have them. The only emails will be the monthly notification regarding the newsletter. There ARE mailing lists out there that are two-way so that people can exchange information. This is not set up that way. Nobody on the list will be able to send anything to the list except Jeff and I. There is a good reason for using a one way list to send the notifications. Jeff has been very lucky so far because he’s sending from his work email. If he were sending the newsletter notices out via a personal email, his email address would get “blacklisted” and you would not get it. Even from work, he has to send multiple emails as he is limited to 500 recipients at a time. And it’s always possible that will change, or that his work address will get blacklisted as a spammer. PLEASE DO THE FOLLOWING TO AVOID THAT HAPPENING IN THE FUTURE – send an email to bassettnews-subscribe@bassettbranches.org. No message needed, in fact we won’t see any message you put in the email. No subject line is needed either. Just send to that address and you’ll be added to the one-way list to be notified about the newsletter once a month.
Q) This question wasn’t posed, but I’ll make it into one. What are the survey results so far?
A) There is no clear cut answer, as the majority is that it doesn’t matter. So, for the time being, this is what we are going to do regarding newsletter vs blog, and .doc vs .pdf. Jeff will give me the articles as he completes them. I will post to the blog. This simplifies things on my end, as I don’t always have time to get them all converted to website format when the newsletter “deadline” comes around. Meanwhile, he will keep the articles in .doc format, and when that month’s newsletter is finished, he’ll send to me and I’ll post BOTH the .doc and .pdf formats. I will leave the “pre-2014” menu item as the archives it is, and I will modify the menu item leading to the blog, so that it refers to “post-2013”. On that page will be a link to the blog, and a link to the .doc and .pdf for each month.
A couple of people with more “techie” knowledge suggested some alternatives like MailChimp, and iContact (there are others) but each of those has reasons for not being a choice in my opinion. I won’t get into why, just that they’ve already been considered and discarded.
One odd thing that happened, is that when at least one person clicked to start the survey, it seemed like Microsoft was wanting them to open an account. That shouldn’t happen, and when they tried again, it worked the way it was supposed to. After completing the survey, and you click on Continue, you do get an ad suggesting you sign up with QuestionPro, but at that point you are finished with the survey and do NOT need to do anything further.
If you still have questions, kathrynjeff@bassettbranches.org will get to both of us.