If you’re a member of the Help-Portrait community site, last week you were sent an email inviting you to unsubscribe. In hindsight, we should have explained our intentions more thoroughly. This post is intended to give you some context for that email.

This year, we celebrate our fifth year of doing Help-Portrait global events. Wow, five years! In the process of ramping up for this year’s events, we are revamping our website and community to better serve the needs of the community. In reviewing our current community, we recognize that there are four different types of community members:

  1. Those who signed up out of curiosity and never actually participated
  2. Those who signed up, participated and are still interested in our organization
  3. Those who signed up, participated, but are no longer interested in hearing from our organization
  4. Spammers

As we look to transition to our new site, the aim of the email blast was two-fold:

  • Invite those people who fit into #1 and #3 a chance to opt-out, something our community site doesn’t do very easily
  • Rid the list of spammers who used invalid email addresses to register their accounts

The goal of the campaign was achieved as we rid of over 1500 spammers and approximately 5000 people opted out of the list. The result is a spam-free, interested and engaged community who will be invited to our new website and community. This is a win/win for everybody.

I want to apologize if the email was confusing or offensive. As you can see from the above explanation, it wasn’t intended to do that. In the future, we will explain our actions in more details in an effort to minimize confusion.

Thanks for being a part of the Help-Portrait community. We couldn’t do this without you.

kyle-standard—Kyle Chowning
Executive Director