The New Zealand Educational Institute (Inc.), or NZEI Te Riu Roa (www.nzei.org.nz), is the union and professional association for teachers in the primary and early childhood sectors, support staff in schools and specialist education services in New Zealand. NZEI Te Riu Roa has nearly 50,000 members.
Until recently, NZEI mailed a printed publication to schools in bulk. They sent all the copies in a see-through wrapper with the school address printed on one side of an A4 sheet of paper and the list of members on the other.
When the publication was replaced with a new magazine, a new distributor was engaged. This distributor, however, could not use the label/list format, and NZEI was dependent upon the school site representatives to make sure the magazine reached the members. “Unfortunately many reps didn’t know the member names and complained that they needed the list,” explained Steve Coates, NZEI’s Senior Officer – Administration & Membership Services. “I was interested in finding a solution that would allow me to e-mail specific reports to specific people automatically. Enter PDF-eXPLODE.”
The organization’s first job using PDF-eXPLODE encompassed creating 3,140 individual lists and emailing them overnight to the schools so the reps could reference them when the magazines arrived as well as contact the organization with any changes to the list. Coates is creating reports with PDF-eXPLODE tags in Microsoft Access, which is the front-end to the mySQL membership database. “So far we have had more than 400 email responses with list changes. Clearly, with the first issue, which did not go out with a list, we received no feedback at all. Had we used conventional mail to send the lists it would have cost us a few thousand dollars and we would not have proceeded.”
Coates said he would “absolutely” recommend PDF-eXPLODE to others. “It is pretty easy to use and solved a major issue for me without my having to roll my own code.” He went on to say “The best attribute of PDF-eXPLODE from my point of view is that I can send hundreds of individual e-mails to people containing only information relevant to them -- all achieved with no additional coding on our part.”
For more information, contact Info@PDF-eXPLODE-US.com .