Worked with an Elementary School Principal who needed a new HTML email newsletter designed that would be sent out to their community.
The old way of doing things was to organize all the info in a Google document weekly – then when the day came to send out the email via gmail to the school community, they would save as a PDF and attach to an email. They mentioned users did not want to take the extra step to have to download a PDF and it was hard to read on mobile devices.
They could not use a service such as MailChimp or Constant Contact due to the fact that they used listservs and users needed a way to unsubscribe if they desired. The solution had to be straight forward with no custom HTML added since the users were not equipped to edit on their own.
I came up with a solution that involved designing the template email in Mailchimp, saving it as a template with a google chrome plugin called Gmail™ Email Templates, then training the user to add their content to the template and send to the listserv.
User would continue to organize content in the google document for the week as they had always done. On the day of, they would create a new draft in gmail, apply the blank HTML template, copy their organized content into the body of the email, apply a few header styles, and send to the listserv.