Thanks to everyone who came out to the Net Tuesday September event focusing on email marketing and fundraising. Your insightful questions were what made it all possible. Well, the awesome audience AND the panelists (Duncan Owen, Shannon Daud, and Ben Johnson.) Thanks all for making me look good!

There won’t be a Net Tuesday in October, but we’ll be back in November. In the meantime, you can relive the summer’s NetSquared Camp unconference with Russell Bennett’s great video.

What I learned this month:

• Panels are a great format for Net Tuesday events. They have lots of energy and help bring the audience into the discussion because they support Q&As really well.
• I need to bring in a mic and speakers for all future events. Struggling to hear the presenterssucks.
• Name tags aren’t solving the “no mingling” problem. I need to bring in food AND assign people to start up discussions before the events.

Email campaigning service providers:

The panel didn’t have time to go deeply into their favorite tools for setting up and distributing email campaigns, but here’s the URLs for the tools mentioned.

• MailChimp (free for up to 1,000 subscribers and 3,000 emails/month. Nonprofit discount available.)
• Vertical Response (10,000 free emails/month for nonprofits. Nonprofit discount available.)
• Campaign Monitor
• Emma email marketing (free account for winners of customer vote. Apply here.

For more see Seattle nonprofit consultants Groundwire’s great overview of email service providers with a focus on integration with Salesforce.com.