Rocky Road Runners is one of the premier road running clubs in Gauteng. Andrea Jacobson, the secretary of Rockies, as it is fondly known, says Rockies has nearly 400 members, of whom 75% have e-mail addresses.
"As a club we need to communicate with our runners to inform them of running and club events each week. We do put out a quarterly newsletter, but we also wanted to e-mail our members regularly, particularly as e-mail is fast, and costs virtually nothing.
"Now that we have obtained a sponsorship from Netcare911, we need to ensure that we communicate even more often with our members. I used to use Outlook as a bulk e-mailer, but found it difficult to send e-mail to all members. Even if only one e-mail address was wrong, I found that all the e-mails would not get delivered. I also struggled to keep my Outlook address book up to date. We started using Economail, and before I had even been given training, I found that with the intuitive way that the software works, I was able to update members` information very quickly and send them all our news via e-mail.
"We have found that our members like to receive regular updates, and for the first time I am able to send them information without any problems whatsoever. We now send a weekly e-mail to all members who really appreciate the news we send them. I like the ability to send e-mails in HTML format as it looks so much more professional, and we can even personalise each e-mail going out with our members` names.
Together with our new sponsor Netcare911, we expect to build up membership numbers and better communication will go a long way to help achieve this.
Bram Katz, chairman of Rockies, said: "Rockies has a proud history of excellent runners - Rae Bisschoff was the ladies Comrade winner a some years back, and multiple Comrades winner Alan Robb has been a member for many years. We have some up and coming young runners. We have over 100 runners who finished Comrades this year. We organise many events for our members: weekly time trials on both Wednesdays and Saturdays. On Wednesdays we cater for both runners and walkers.
On Sundays we have a planned club run, of varying distances from 14km for walkers to 21km for runners and further for those runners preparing for the ultra marathons. We operate from the Waverley Bowling club, conveniently located off the Athol Oaklands off-ramp of the M1. Visitors are most welcome. Economail has made it a pleasure to communicate with our members.
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