Voice Your Choice

URL: voiceyourchoice.org
Tech: Drupal 6, Amazon SES

Voice Your Choice (VYC) is a voter education campaign inspiring hope and courage among present and future generations to ‘voice our choice’ by practising our democratic right to vote.

I was contacted to find the best and cost-effective way to send newsletter emails to tens of thousands of users in their system (legally of course, because spam sucks!). In the end, I integrated their Drupal-based opt-in mass emailing system with Amazon SES (Simple Email Service). All emails on the site, from single administrative emails to mass newsletter emails, are now handled by SES.

Why not just get a dedicated SMTP server to do the work? Well, every tried sending out 50,000 emails, on a non-profit budget and reliably? SES was a winner here.