Feature: Email Capture & Notifications for users

[kempsterrrr]

For academy to be successfully it's vital the platform has the ability to communicate with it's users.

Whilst social media can be good for awareness it is nowhere near as a effective at converting users as email. If you can capture someones email once, you speak can speak directly to them forever.

From a quick google search you can find plenty of data supporting the case for email > social. I can also attest to the impact moving to Luma had on our ability to deliver good hackathon results over just social, specifically because we could email hackathon attendees directly. One of the biggest benefit is every time we launch something we grow the list and this compounds the value of we can provide to partners and thus funding we can bring in.

In the retro the team agreed on the importance of Business Model & Rewards - I believe email is the most important product feature to make a difference here.

Some notifications I believe would be powerful for academy:

• New Lesson / Track notifications (we could do this manually to begin with)
• Monthly academy update to all users (we could do this manually to begin with)
• Reminder to complete unfinished lesson / track
• Regularly reminders / summaries of progress
• Success messages for completing lessons / tracks with links to suitable next courses
• Social share links in the emails to encourage user to boast about their learning progress

The DAO has a paid SendGrid account we use for sending emails from the forum via their API. This has plenty of capacity in it's current tier we could use without incurring any extra costs.

I propose we do this in stages:

1. Immediately start capturing people emails and do the 1st two items from this list manually.
2. Build email into the users accounts properly and support notifications as we can.

A small table below on numbers from a quick google search (link):