Help With Yahoo! Groups: Lesser Known Resources

Though I've shouted explicatives many times about Yahoo! Groups as a community manager- I really think it is an impressive communciation and community building platform, for something that's free.

When managing Yahoo! Groups (and OneList/eGroups before it) I learned about and used a few resources that I had to hunt-for at the time. This post will outline a couple of lesser-known ways to manage groups and information about groups. I hope they may help some list owners out there...

Email Commands: Changing Message Delivery Options with Email

Any member can send an email command to change the way they receive emails from Yahoo! Groups. This is particularly useful for list owners who have members who are constantly asking about how to change options. By making these commands available consistently, you may be able to reduce the redundant questions. The email must come *from* the address used by Yahoo!.

    There is currently no email command to change to "Special Notices"

Just be clear, a real life example for changing the option to individual emails for the impeccable Online Facilitation list would be this: onlinefacilitation-normal@groups.yahoo.com


Percentage of Members Using Each Email Delivery Option

If you've ever wondered how many of your members use each delievery option, the steps below will help you get to this information.

As a moderator, you can go to the "Members" area and click the "Export List". This will display a comma delimited file of member information in your browser.

    1. In your browser, click File --> Save As and save the information as a *text* (.txt) file on your hard drive.
    2. Open a spreadsheet program (Excel in this example) and click File --> Open and find the file you just saved. With Excel, it should recognize the text file and open a "Text Import Wizard".
    3. In step one of the wizard, choose "delimited". In step two, change the delimiter to "comma" and the text qualifier to single a quotation. This will make the data look more clean. Click "Finish"- no more changes are needed. After clicking "Finish" you'll see the data displayed in a spreadsheet.
    4. Find the column that contains the email delivery options and click the heading of the column to highlight the whole column. Once highlighted, go to the toolbar and click Data --> Sort. If asked, choose to "Continue with current selection" and click "Sort...".
    5. Once you're viewing the Sort window with the correct column indicated, just click "Sort" (yes, it seems redundant here). This will sort the delivery options into groups. Now, all you have to do is count the number of members with each option to understand what percentage of your members are using each option.

This can be particularly useful in monitoring your group's changing habits over time. Or, it may be good for targeting particular groups of members based on their delivery option.


Yahoo! Groups for Help with Yahoo! Groups

I have used a couple of high volume groups that focus on using and understanding Yahoo! Groups. They are:

Email List Managers

List Help


I hope this is helpful. Once I found out about these resources, they became essential- but like I said- I had to hunt them down for some reason.