To help foster the effective use of email among activists in the Northwest conservation community, ONE/Northwest hosts email lists for Northwest environmental organizations and groups of citizen activists. We currently host over 1000 email lists with over 180,000 unique subscribers.  These lists form the backbone of the communications infrastructure of the Northwest conservation community.  (What if I'm not in the Pacific Northwest?).

Note: We can host email lists only for people working predominantly within the region bound by Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. For lists comprised of people outside of this geography, we suggest you review our list of other email list hosting providers. If you have questions as to whether your list meets our requirements, please email us at info@onenw.org. ONE/Northwest reserves the right to deny any lists that do not meet our standards.

What are email lists? Why do people use them?

An email list is a tool that makes it easy to reach multiple people by sending a message to a single email address. This single email address is associated with a list of the email addresses of all the people subscribed to the list.  Our email lists also include features such as web-based archives, tools for reviewing and managing lists of subscribers and for managing "bouncing" email addresses.

Email lists can help groups of people communicate and collaborate more effectively. Email lists can be used for mundane purposes like scheduling meetings, forwarding information, and simple notifications. Or, they can be used to hold online "conversations" in which group decisions can be made, documents reviewed, and feedback gathered.

For more information on a strategy for creating email lists for your organization, see our article A Strategy for Using Email Lists.

What are ONE/Northwest's email lists not good at doing?

Our lists are not designed to send graphics-rich HTML emails--they can do HTML but  for graphics heavy email newsletters with robust features, you are better off using WhatCounts.

Costs

ONE/Northwest has a long-standing commitment to provide high-quality, secure email list hosting at the lowest possible cost. Most of the cost of providing list hosting services is subsidized by foundation and individual donor contributions to ONE/Northwest. However, we ask that the recipients of this service show their support by making a suggested annual donation - a validation of the program that shows that it's worth continuing. The suggested donation is far below the market rate for this kind of service, and we hope that you will find it an acceptable sum for what you receive in return. We will continue to offer no-cost support and assistance for all of our lists regardless of the donation you make.

Please note that these rates are per organization, not per list, and therefore a single annual rate covers all of your organization's lists on our system.

*"Volunteer group" is defined as "no paid staff."

Getting Started

In order to establish an email list, you must request a password from our list hosting site at http://lists.onenw.org/lists. Then read these instructions for creating your email list.

Other Sources of Email Lists

If you're not an environmental activist or organization in the Pacific Northwest, there are some other organizations that can provide you with free or low-cost email lists.

NPOGroups (http://www.npogroups.org) offers high-quality, low-cost email list hosting using the same open-source software that ONE/Northwest uses. Based in the Bay Area, NPOGroups offers list hosting services to nonprofits everywhere.

Already have a list and need technical support? Visit the Email List Help Guide.