Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and the work you do?
I am a web developer who has been building websites and apps for almost twenty years. I was inspired to create Church Social when I saw my own church struggling to manage its membership records. Our administrator was using some super old desktop church software. I realized then that there was an opportunity to create a web-based product that wouldn't only help our administrator, but would allow all members of our congregation to get engaged and benefit from it.
We incorporated in 2012, and our mission was simple: we wanted to help churches get organized and communicate more easily online. Fast forward to today, and our mission remains much the same. We help congregations manage their membership records, send emails, and share a wide variety of church related resources, including a calendar of events, member directory, schedules, weekly bulletins, photos, sermons, files, and more.
How are you using Postmark with Church Social today?
Maybe the most important feature of Church Social is our messaging tools. They allow churches to send messages (emails) to some, or all of the members within their congregation quickly and easily. This helps church members stay engaged and informed during the week, helping them serve each other better. Postmark plays a critical role in this by allowing us to send these emails quickly and reliably. We use bounce tracking to help churches identify incorrect member email addresses.
If you could add one feature to Postmark, what would it be?
It would be awesome if Postmark could inline CSS for non-template emails. It would help ensure that emails display properly for our customers, without having to solve this problem in our application.
If you could give fellow developers one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their transactional email, what would it be?
Keep your transactional email about people. People care about other people... not necessarily your app. Wherever possible, include names within your transactional emails. This could be in the from name (Jonathan @ YourApp), or in the subject line (New message from Jonathan), or simply in the email body somewhere.