UKC

I'd be interested to hear what solutions climbing clubs have come up with for allowing members to communicate by email (particularly in the era of GDPR!).

For one of the clubs I'm involved with we've had basic email forwarding set up for a few years so that members can email one address and their email is then forwarded to the other members of the club. However, this looks quite spammy to various ISPs/mail service providers so deliverability isn't great. 

I don't want us to have to shift to e.g. Google Groups or similar which needs each individual to have an account; I'd rather we could add members (with their permission) to a list and then have members email an address which is then distributed to other club members.  I _particularly_ don't want to set up a forum/community!

I've briefly looked at membermojo.co.uk which seems to do something like that, but would be keen to hear what other clubs are doing.

our clubs ISP provides mailman as one of the tools and we use that, (not without some issues)

Cheers, will look into that. Do you have any problems with the address getting blacklisted? Since you can't really add SPF records etc, I guess, when there are a lot of different senders.

we had some issues with google silently throwing away emails, we resolved it with a 'munge headers' option on mailman. other than that seems quite good.

Our orienteering club moved to using Mailchimp which I think resolved a lot of their group email issues. I assume they're GDPR compliant...

Mailchimp's OK for centralised mailings (newsletters etc) but not so much use for individual members to email all other members. Correct me if I'm wrong (I'd rather like it if I were!)

Be less paranoid about it.

The Information Commissioner is not really interested in small clubs, it will be the large databases held by big companies etc she will be looking at.

Google Groups only needs the admin(s) of the Group to have Google accounts so they can add/invite members etc. You can add a bunch of people at once with Google Groups - they then receive a message telling them they've been added to the group along with the details of how to unsubscribe etc. 

The members of a Google Group can have any email address and they can receive and send to the group assuming the group has been set up to allow all members to post to it. 

One of the clubs I'm in uses Google Groups and as far as I can tell it seems to be working fine for us.

If a user does have problems receiving the emails then getting them to whitelist the group email address in their client or double checking that they didn't at some point block all Google Group emails is usually the solution. 

The Oread uses a Yahoo Group mailing list which works OK (however there needs to be a firm set of rules applied otherwise you just get people posting rubbish on there).

Somehow the NMC has managed to persuade all of its members onto Facebook and uses that to organise evening meets/ casual days out at the crag. This is far better than the Yahoo group arrangement.

This is outside the scope of GDPR. People are members of the club, so therefore the club has "legitimate interest" in storing their details and contacting them about the club.

It would only fall foul if it either sent them sales material not related to the club, or continued to send someone communications after they'd said they didn't want them.

'the club' may have legitimate reasons to email people, but what about it's members?

to the OP - facebook generally works for us. People can set up anonymous/fake profiles if they're worried about data security on FB.

Correct, but when a member makes a data protection complaint the club will be under just as much scrutiny as a big company will be.

GDPR doesn't cover inter-personal communication...?

We use  Email DoDo which allows group email and seems to avoid being classified as spam.  you can define closed or open groups  and multiple administrators which is very cool and even the paid version (if you want your own domain ) is very cheap. i like it a lot.

This advice from the BMC may give you some of the answers you need; https://www.thebmc.co.uk/media/files/GDPR%20and%20BMC%20Clubs%20-%20ListsOf...