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The Constant Contact account is not the problem.
Constant Contact does what it says, the support line is answered by a person, and the event tools are genuinely good. None of that helps with the part that stalls, which is writing something worth reading every month.
What Constant Contact is good at
Constant Contact has been around a long time and it earned its place with a specific kind of customer: the local service business and the small nonprofit. Restaurants, clinics, salons, churches, chambers, foundations, booster clubs.
Two things it does better than most. The first is events — registrations, ticketing, RSVPs and the reminder emails around them, which for a nonprofit running a gala or a chamber running a monthly mixer is most of the reason to have email software at all. The second is support. You can call them and reach somebody, and for a volunteer board treasurer who inherited the account that is worth more than any feature list.
Pricing runs on contact-count tiers with a trial period to get started. We are not quoting figures because theirs move and a stale price on this page would be the one thing you catch us on.
The pattern we see with local businesses and nonprofits
The account was set up by somebody who has since left. Or it is run by whoever has the password this year. Or the executive director does it at eleven at night between the grant report and the board packet.
What comes out of that is an email before the event and nothing in between. Which is a shame, because the in-between is where the relationship actually lives. Donors who only ever hear from you when you want something learn the pattern quickly. So do patients, and so do members.
This is a staffing reality, not a failure of will. Small organizations do not have a spare person, and the newsletter is always the thing that can wait one more week.
Keep the software if somebody likes doing it
Same test as anywhere else on this site, and we mean it. If there is a person in your organization who genuinely enjoys writing the newsletter, do not hire this out. They will do it better than a supplier, they know the members by name, and Constant Contact is all the tooling they need.
The reason to pay someone is that nobody there wants the job, and pretending otherwise produces a newsletter nobody wants to read either.
Nonprofits: check whether you qualify for their nonprofit discount before you consider spending anything with us. It is worth an email to their support line, and we would rather you saved the money.
What we would produce instead
For a local service business or a small nonprofit, the issue looks different from a law firm’s. Less explaining, more people.
- Somebody’s story. A patient, a member, a volunteer, a family who got helped — with permission, in their words where possible.
- What the money did. Nonprofits under-report this constantly and it is the single most effective thing on the page.
- What is coming up, with dates, so the event email is a reminder rather than an announcement.
- One short column from the director, the owner or the pastor, ghostwritten from a twenty-minute call and approved by them.
- A thank-you list where it is appropriate, which is the reason a printed issue gets kept on a fridge.
Print matters more for this audience than for most
A lot of email advice quietly assumes the reader is thirty-five and lives in an inbox. For a parish, a clinic or a legacy-giving program that assumption is wrong, and it is wrong about exactly the people who give the most and stay the longest.
Print costs money, so we will not pretend it is free. Print and postage run about 60–70¢ a copy through our production partner and we bill it to you at cost with no markup. For a five-hundred-name list that is a real but manageable line, and it is often the line that produces the replies.
If it is not manageable, digital only is a real option with the same writing and the same schedule, and you can add print later when it pays for itself.
Events, and where the two things fit together
If events are why you have Constant Contact, keep it. Registration, ticketing and the reminder chain are a genuine strength and there is no reason to move that work.
What we would add sits around the event rather than inside it — the issue that goes out between events so people remember who you are, and the follow-up afterwards that thanks the people who came and tells the ones who did not what they missed. Those two are what turn an annual event into a list that stays warm all year.
We can write and send from your existing account. Nothing has to move for this to start.
Who holds the password when the person leaves
This is the quiet problem in small organizations and it has nothing to do with which software you picked. Turnover in a nonprofit or a small practice is normal, and the email account tends to leave with whoever set it up.
What you end up with is a list you cannot reach, a sending domain nobody can authenticate, and a board that decides to start fresh — which throws away years of accumulated permission.
- The account should be in the organization’s name, on an organization email address, not a personal one.
- At least two people should be able to get into it, and one of them should be a board officer or an owner.
- Export the full list, including unsubscribes, once a quarter and keep the file somewhere the organization controls.
- The sending domain should be yours and authenticated, so the mail keeps arriving when staff changes.
Every account we open is opened in your name, and you can export your list yourself at any time without asking us. That is the arrangement whether or not you ever use it.
When the answer is no
If your entire list is under a hundred people and they all know you personally, write to them yourself. A short honest email from a named person beats a produced newsletter at that scale every time.
If you are a nonprofit whose budget is genuinely tight, spend on the program first. We will say so on the call rather than take the retainer, and we would rather point you at a volunteer with a writing habit.
And if what you actually need is somebody to run your Facebook page, that is not us — we do not do social media management, and we would rather be clear about it now.
Questions
The things people ask before they hire us.
No. We can write and produce the issue and send it from the account you already have. Your list, your history and your event tools stay untouched. If moving ever makes sense, we will explain why before anyone touches anything.
They price on contact-count tiers with a trial to start, and they revise it often enough that we will not quote a figure here. Check their pricing page, and ask about the nonprofit discount if that applies to you.
We can write the campaigns and sequences around an event, and set up the follow-up so attendees hear from you afterwards. The registration and ticketing itself is something Constant Contact already does well and we would leave it there.
Often yes, for the older half of a donor file specifically. Print and postage are around 60–70¢ a copy at cost. Start digital only if the budget is tight — the writing and the schedule are the same either way.
About twenty minutes a month on a call, plus reading the proof. One person needs to be the approver so the issue is not waiting on a committee.
No. We stopped offering posting and community management. Newsletters, email, ads, CRM follow-up, AI automation and basic web and SEO are what we do.
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Paying for the software and sending twice a year?
Tell us who your list is and what you wish they heard from you. We will tell you what an issue would look like and what it would cost — or that you are better off keeping the money and giving somebody an afternoon.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.