Emailing your members

The Messaging Centre is where you email members. It sends one email per person rather than a single message with everybody in the Bcc line, which means each one can be personalised and none of them can see each other's addresses.

Choosing who gets it

Type a name to add somebody individually, or use the buttons to fill the list in one go:

• All members
• All plot holders
• Unpaid members — everybody who still owes on the current year
• Waiting list — everybody on it, in position order
• A group — one button per member group you have set up

You can mix and match, and remove anybody you did not mean to include.

Members who signed up through your public form and do not yet have a plot are left out of "All members" on purpose. They are on your waiting list, not your site.

Personalising it

Drop one of the tokens into your message and each person gets their own version. {member_name} and {plot_fees} are the everyday ones; there are also tokens for what they owe, an itemised breakdown of their invoice, a link to their own balance page, and one for each charge you have set up.

The full list is on the screen, and clicking one drops it into your message.

Who it comes from

Emails go out from Allotmin's address, but the name on them and the Reply-To address come from a sender profile. Set these up in Settings → Email senders — "Greenfields Allotments Secretary", replying to your own inbox.

Replies go to you, not to us.

Attachments

Anything in your document library can be attached. Upload once, attach as often as you like.

Saving what you write

If you send the same thing every year, save it as a template. Templates keep their subject and body, and can have documents attached to them permanently.

What happens after you send

Every email that goes out is recorded against that member, so their correspondence record shows what they were sent and when.

If anything fails — a bad address, a full mailbox — Allotmin finishes the rest of the run and then shows you a breakdown of what worked and what did not, in plain English, with a button to report it to us.

Before your first send

You need to confirm your own email address. There is a banner at the top of the app until you do. This is to stop Allotmin being used to send mail from an address nobody has proved they own — it protects the delivery rate of every association using it, including yours.