VolunteerMatters allows an administrator to create and schedule bulk emails and send them to specific subsets of the contact database. Every email may contain text, hyperlinks, embedded images, and file attachments.
When you visit Admin > Email you will see any previously entered email drafts and/or previously sent emails via this tool. The listing of draft emails would be at the top of the page, while sent emails would be listed just below that.
Draft emails are listed with their creation date/time and the subject of the email message. To the right of each listing there are three icons Edit (
), Delete(
), and Preview/Send (
). Their labels accurately describe the action the system will allow upon clicking each icon.
Sent emails are listed with their scheduled date/time, sent (completed) date/time, subject and status. The Status will either be “In Queue” for those messages awaiting delivery or “Completed” for those emails that were sent. There are two icons to the right of each listing, Delete(), and View (
). Viewing the sent email allows you to see exactly what messages, and attachments were sent to which contacts.
**Please note, at this time, scheduled emails can not be edited once they are submitted to be sent. Scheduled emails can only be deleted.
Creating a New Email
- Log into your VolunteerMatters Administrative system and navigate to Admin > Email (under the Communication section).
- Click ‘new’ (
) - Enter a ‘From Name’.
The ‘From Name’ is the common name that appears in the from field when you receive an email. For example, you may set this to be your first and last name. The 'From Email Address' is fixed and is set to mail@volunteermatters.com. - Enter a ‘Reply-to Name’.
If a contact should click “Reply” on a message this is the common name that will be inserted in their ‘To:’ field. - Enter a ‘Reply-to Address’.
This is the email address that should receive all replies to this email. The default email address and names can be modified by an administrator with Setup access via page 1 of the System Setup Wizard. Just change the email and click "Save and Continue" and you are done - Select recipients. You may add selected contacts by using the contact chooser. To learn more about searching and selecting contacts via the chooser and List Views, please reference the articles "Working with the contact chooser." and "Manage List Views for Contact Lists". After selecting the proper contact records from the contact chooser you will see that the list of selected contacts now appears in the “Recipients” box.
- Enter a subject for the email
- Enter the ‘Body’ of your email message. You may add any text, line breaks (Ctrl + ’Enter’), paragraph breaks (‘Enter’), hyperlinks, and embedded images to the body of the email. The HTML body field should have a toolbar that provides functionality similar to that of a word processor. If you hover over the icons in the toolbar a description will appear to reveal the buttons purpose. For helpful hints on copying and pasting from MS Word, inserting hyperlinks, inserting anchors, inserting embedded images and spell check please see the "HTML Email Body Formatting" article.
- Enter a “Plain Text” version of your email. Some email clients will not accept HTML emails (font formatting, images, hyperlinks, lists, etc). You should enter a separate text only version of the email in this field to accommodate those recipients. This version of the email will only be used if the recipient cannot accept HTML emails. If you do not insert text in this field, those recipients that cannot read HTML emails will only receive the message “Your email client does not support HTML messages”.
NOTE: Each time an email is sent via VolunteerMatters the system automatically records a communication interaction record in each contact recipient’s communication tab. The history record only includes the text inserted in the ‘Plain Text Body’ field. If you only insert HTML body content, the history log entry will only show that an email was sent on a particular date and time and will not include the body content of the email.
In most cases, simply cutting and pasting the text from the HTML body field to the ‘Plain Text Body’ field will provide an adequate alternate version with only minor edits. - Attach files to the email. Click ‘Browse’ to the right of ‘Attach New file’ 1, 2, or 3 to select a local file that you would like included as an attachment to the email. If you have more than 3 file attachments, click ‘Save after entering the first three files and it will provide you the opportunity to add three additional files. The combined file size for all attachments cannot exceed 5MB.
- Click Save and Preview
- The HTML and Plain text preview are available as hyperlinks to open in a new window to provide 100% preview accuracy. This will ensure no effect from any styling from your VolunteerMatters system.
- After previewing the email you may either choose to 'Cancel', ‘Edit’, ‘Send Now’ or 'Send Later'.
- If you choose to ‘Cancel’, the system will return you to the E-Mail list where you will see your email in the draft folder with 'Create Date' and 'Subject' displayed. Here you can 'Edit', 'Delete' or 'Preview',
- If you choose to ‘Edit’, the system will return you to the E-Mail list where you can edit the email and then you can 'Cancel', 'Save', 'Save and Preview' or 'Save and Return'.
- If you choose to ‘Send Now’, the 'Send' button will appear and you can click and submit your email to the job engine to be sent. The system will return you to the E-Mail list where you will see your sent email either with a status of “In Queue” (awaiting delivery) or “Completed” (sent).
- If you choose to ‘Send Later’, the 'Send Later' schedule window and button will appear and you enter the 'Sent After Date' (via a calendar chooser) and the 'Send After Time' (via a dropdown).
There you can enter the date and time desired for your email to be sent and the click the 'Send Later' button and submit your email to the job engine to be sent. The system will return you to the E-Mail list where you will see your sent email with a status of “In Queue” (awaiting delivery).
- If desired you can delete the scheduled email by clicking on the 'Delete' icon () in the "Sent Folder". As stated above at this time, scheduled emails can not be edited once they are submitted to be sent.
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