Communications Committee Project:
Improving Association/Park communications
We plan to hold a zoom meeting over the 2026 summer season, to allow members to better understand our collective thinking on this topic. If any of you remember the old website, we needed to replace it because any content changes required contacting Nexicom, and they were casting off that business, so updates became harder and harder to arrange, and the website aged to virtually be of no use and full of old data. The two remaining useful exceptions were the lake-facing camera feed (a topic for another day/post); and secondly, that it had an embedded email distribution system -- meaning that all your provided emails were uploaded into the Nexicom-hosted system and park e-blasts went out from that system. That system worked effectively, yet It wasn't CASL compliant, and interestingly did not comply with our own Privacy Policy and Membership Agreement. It worked effectively as an email distribution system because it was a registered system (Nexicom white-labelled a product called OMNIA) and as such, it avoided the mail jail and spam filtering that makes life so difficult today - because when we moved to our Squarespace website we lost the email distribution system. The plan was to replace it, but the Squarespace embedded system is Google-based, and our Office staff are Outlook/Microsoft users . The Squarespace email option is also relatively expensive, and not as feature rich as true Email Distribution Systems (like MailChimp, Benchmark, Constant Contact, MailerLite, etc.).
"Mail Jail": This is a concept most people don't experience, as we don't email usually more than one or two, or maybe 10 people in our "send to:" line of our emails. Try doing 100, and your ID will probably be locked by your own email provider as a probable source of spam. On the receiving side, your email will carry a flag that the receiving system gets as a hint of sorts to throw your email in the "junk" or "spam" folder, or perhaps consider to reject it entirely. This is the email providers participating in the industry's efforts to cut down on spam, and sadly, it can't really tell "valid" senders from spammy senders.
Enter "Email Distribution Systems" like MailChimp, Benchmark, Constant Contact, MailerLite, etc ... who agree to follow strict privacy and anti-spam legislation in return for being able to send the same email out to hundreds, even thousands. They comply with CASL (Canada Anti-Spam Legislation), as an example, they must have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of every email. They also must follow strict data privacy rules, or face significant fines, and the damage to their reputation would put them out of business.
Do any of these companies sell email lists?
No — none of the major email‑marketing platforms sell subscriber lists. This is backed by privacy policies and by independent investigations.
The following graphic gives summary information of usage and privacy commitments of these common Email Distribution Systems the park is considering to replace our old and mothballed system:
