Messages

Open Reach → Messages to email members or send a portal notice.

1. Write a subject and message, or start from a template. The template buttons work once the message box has finished loading. If you have already written something, picking a template asks before it replaces your words.

2. Choose email, portal inbox, or both. Text message is not available yet.

3. Choose an audience: a quick choice such as Everyone with an active membership, a saved segment, or conditions you set. Whatever you choose shows as conditions you can change, and + Add condition keeps what is already there. An audience that can't be shown as conditions, such as Board and staff (people with either tag), shows a note instead of conditions and stays as it is until you add a condition, which replaces it. The audience written out as text is under Advanced, which starts closed. One count beside Review and send updates after every change: about how many households a portal notice reaches, how many people an email reaches once duplicates are removed, and how many of them opted out of email. Nothing is saved or sent by looking at the count. (Saved segments has a count of its own.)

4. Select Review and send or Save as draft. Review and send shows a preview first, and for a portal-only notice a confirmation on the same page; nothing goes out until you confirm there.

For email, review the test message sent to your configured test recipients before sending it to members. You can also publish an email on the website's news page, where anyone can read it, not just members. The news page shows the same message the email did, pictures and buttons included.

A portal notice shows the words of your message as plain text in each household's portal inbox. Pictures, buttons and other blocks appear only in the email and on the news page.

When you choose both, the email and the portal notice go out together. The notice is posted the moment the email starts sending, whichever way it starts: Send to audience now, a scheduled time, the Email history list, or an assistant you approved. Edit the message on the email's own page: the notice is updated with it, so households never see an old version in the portal.

The notice is checked against the club as it is when the email starts. If its audience names something the club no longer has, such as a camp week, membership tier or custom field deleted after the message was written, the email still goes out but the notice is not posted and stays a draft in Portal notice history. After Send to audience now, the message on the email's page says so and why, and an assistant you approved is told the same. A scheduled send has nobody watching, so Swim Ops is alerted instead; after a scheduled email with a portal notice goes out, check that the notice shows as published in Portal notice history. A draft notice can't be edited, so to reach those households in the portal, write a new portal notice in Messages.

Test and review copies follow the same stop switches real member email does. If all club email is paused across Swim Ops, or this is the demo club, neither will go out and the screen says so.

The message box is the block editor. Type / to add a heading, a list, a picture, a gallery, a button, a callout, a toggle, a video or a divider; select words to make them bold or add a link; drag a block's handle to move it. How each block works, the keyboard shortcuts, and how pictures and pasting behave are all in Writing with the block editor.

Your message is saved only when you select Save as draft, Review and send, or Save draft on an email's own page. If something in the message can't be saved, a note under the box says what to fix and the save waits for you.

To have a first draft written for you, see Drafting with the assistant.

Every email also carries a plain-text version for email programs that don't show pictures: lists as lines starting with a dash, a button as its text and its address, a picture as its description in [square brackets], then your club's footer and the unsubscribe line.

Animated GIFs play in most email apps, but some desktop email apps (such as Outlook on Windows) show only the first frame. When your email has a GIF, the preview on the email's page reminds you.

How every newsletter looks (the top of the email, lettering, button shape, picture corners and a footer note) is set on the Branding page. Open Club → Club info and select Branding under Related. Only admins can open it. An email's look is locked in when its review copies go out; see Branding for how to apply changed settings to it.

Each person in an email's audience gets their own row, and the email is only marked finished once every row has an outcome. A row can sit unfinished if a send was interrupted, for example if the club's connection dropped mid-send. Open the email and select Recover stuck sends. It picks up anyone still waiting and retries anyone whose send failed. Nobody who already received the email gets it again, so it is safe to use whenever the numbers look stuck.

A copy still waiting more than a week after the email was marked finished is not sent late, because the news in it is old by then. Its row under Recipients shows as not sent: "this message was still waiting more than a week after the campaign finished, so it was not sent late." The automatic check that runs every few minutes does the same.

Scheduled emails are picked up by a check that runs every few minutes. If two of those checks overlap, only one of them starts the email, so a scheduled send cannot go out twice.

If emails are going out that shouldn't, for example a workflow that keeps emailing the same families, managers and admins can stop the club's email at once. At the bottom of Messages → Write, select Pause the club's email, say why in a sentence, and select Pause email. It takes effect right away.

While email is paused:

• Emails sent because something just happened are stopped and not sent later. Receipts, booking confirmations, workflow emails, replies to help requests and staff notices (such as a new help request, a help request assigned to someone, or a refund check to write) stay unsent even after you resume.

• Scheduled emails wait. Statements, renewal reminders, autopay notices, camp seat warnings, waitlist offers and registration announcements are not sent while email is paused, and go out on their usual schedule after you resume. Nothing that depends on them happens in the meantime: no unpaid camp seat is released without its warning, and no automatic dues payment is taken without its notice. A place freed while email is paused, by a cancellation or a declined offer, is offered to the next family after you resume, so nobody's offer runs out unseen. A booking reminder whose day has passed is skipped.

• Messages you send from Messages wait. They go out within about 20 minutes after email is resumed.

• Some emails still go: sign-in links, emails that confirm an email address, household invitations, and security notices such as "your sign-in email changed", so staff and members can still get in.

• Text messages are not paused.

The club's email can also pause itself. If an unusually large number of automatic emails goes out in an hour or a day, far more than the club's size could explain, email is paused automatically and the notice says what it saw. A normal all-members send, such as a renewal reminder, does not trip it. This limit is the same for every club; it is not a setting.

The notice and Resume

While email is paused, a notice titled The club's email is paused shows at the top of Home and of every Messages tab. It says who paused it, or that it was paused automatically and what was seen; when; why; and each email it has stopped so far, by name, with how many. Select Show who they were for to see the latest 50 of them: which email, who it was for, their household (a link to the household's Activity tab) and when.

To turn email back on, select Resume email on the notice, write one sentence on what happened, and select Resume email again. The sentence is kept in the audit log. Only managers and admins can resume; other staff see the notice without the button.

Resuming does not send what the pause stopped. Follow up yourself on anything that mattered, such as a receipt someone needs. The list does not go away when you resume: open Messages → Sent and choose Not sent to see the emails the pause or the per-person limits stopped in the last 30 days, newest first, with who each was for, the household, when and why. Scheduled emails in the list, such as statements and reminders, are tried again on their own; the rest need you to follow up. Resuming does not change any limit either: if email pauses itself again soon after, something is still sending too much, so check Workflows first.

Why a single email was stopped, by the pause or by the per-person limits, is covered in Why a message didn't send.

If an email went to the news page that should not have, or it mentions something private, open it from Sent. On a sent email, the News page card says whether anyone can read it on the website. Select Remove from news page and the page stops working right away: it no longer appears in the news list, and anyone with its address sees "not found".

Emails people already received are not affected. Removing the page cannot take back an email from anyone's inbox.

Select Show on news page to put it back. That makes it readable by anyone again, so check the message first. Managers and admins can do both, and each change is recorded in the audit log.

Removing an email from the news page does not remove pictures or files placed in it from their own web addresses. If a picture must go, use Delete permanently in the media library.

A portal notice that came with the email stops linking to the news page while it is removed.

Messages is for many people at once. To write to a single household about their own account or waitlist place, use Message on the Waitlist or on the household's page instead (see Message a household, and saved replies). If your club has turned that on, Messages also has a Saved replies tab: your library of wording to start those notes and ticket replies from.

A portal notice sent as an email by a connected tool, or from Portal notice history, goes to members only. It is not put on the news page unless whoever publishes it ticks Also post the email on the website's news page. The approval request says "Also posted on the club's public news page" when it will be.

Use Sent to review emails and portal notices. Filter by channel or status. Select Continue to finish a draft. Not sent lists emails that were stopped by the club's pause, by a pause Swim Ops put on every club's email, or by the per-person limits, so you can follow up.

An email's own page

Select an email in Sent to open its page. From top to bottom:

• Edit. A draft can be changed here: its name, subject, message, button, audience, and whether it is also posted on the website's news page after sending. If the email has already been seeded, saving changes puts it back to draft, and it needs a fresh seed before it can go out.

• Preview. Shows the last saved version exactly as it will be delivered. Nothing is sent. Open full-size shows it in its own tab.

• Actions. Send a test email sends the last saved version to one address; it does not count as the required seed review. Send seed sends the review copies to your test recipients. If someone saves a change while the review copies are going out, the seed does not count: the page says the email changed, and you send the review copies again. After a seed, Send to audience now sends the email to everyone, and Schedule picks a later time in the club's time zone; the page shows the scheduled time back in that same zone, for example "Sat, Jul 4, 9:00 AM EDT". A scheduled email can be unscheduled, even at the last minute: once you cancel or move the time, it does not go out at the old time. A draft, seeded or scheduled email can be cancelled; a cancelled email cannot be reopened.

• Engagement. After sending: how many were sent, delivered, opened, clicked and bounced, plus any spam complaints.

• Link clicks. Which links people followed.

• Recipients. One row per person with what happened to their copy. Retry failed or Recover stuck sends appears when some copies failed or are stuck. Each copy checks the member again just before it goes: a member who has since turned off club email, or changed their email address, is shown as not sent instead of being mailed.

The separate Email history list (find it by searching the admin for "Email history") shows the same emails with their audience and delivery counts, and adds Duplicate, which starts a new draft from an earlier email.

Portal notice history (search for it the same way) lists the portal notices. A notice saved as a draft shows who it will reach; Publish puts it in each household's portal inbox. A notice written in Messages with both email and portal already has its email on its own page under Sent, so Publish here posts the notice only, and the confirmation says so; the email goes out when you send it from that page. A notice whose email has no page yet (one an assistant drafted, for example) sends that email when you publish it, and the confirmation says how many members it will email. Publishing is irreversible: the audience is frozen and delivery starts immediately, so check the audience first.

Audience

Under Audience, manage saved segments, newsletter subscribers, and blocked email addresses.

• Saved segments are named groups you can reuse as the audience for several messages. Build one with the audience builder; opening one to edit shows its audience as conditions, and the screen shows how many members and subscribers match and how many people that is once duplicates and anyone who opted out are removed. A saved audience that can't be shown as conditions is kept as written under Advanced until you add a condition. If a saved audience names a program and Programming is turned off, its count is 0 and the line under it says Programming is turned off, so no one is in this audience. The audience builder shows the same line in place of a count. Changing a segment does not change messages that already used it, and deleting one does not either.

• Newsletter subscribers are people who signed up for club news without a membership. You can add one person, paste a list (one address per line, or address and name separated by a comma), search the list, and unsubscribe or re-subscribe someone.

• Suppressions are addresses the club must not email, with the reason: the person unsubscribed, the address bounced, the person reported spam, or you blocked it by hand. You can block an address and remove a block you added. Lifting a bounce or a spam complaint is for admins only; use Lift only when the cause (such as a mistyped address) is fixed and it is safe to resume email to that address.

Use Automatic emails to see every email and text the club sends on its own, such as receipts, dues reminders and waitlist offers, and preview exactly what people get.

Message the people registered for a program

When your club uses Programming (the section your club may have given its own name in Club → Programs), the audience builder has a condition, People registered for a program. Select + Add condition, change Condition type to People registered for a program, then choose the program from the list, which shows each program's name and dates. Programs not yet published say draft, programs that are over say finished, and canceled programs are not listed because nobody is left to reach. The message goes to everyone in the household of each person registered, including every adult in it, not only the one who registered. A household that registered only a child is reached through its adults. People whose registration was canceled, and people only on a waitlist, are not included. The count beside Review and send shows how many people that is and, as for any audience, how many of them have opted out of email; they won't get it.

On a program's Roster, Message everyone registered opens Messages with that audience already chosen. It reaches everyone registered, whatever filter the roster shows. It is already there as a People registered for a program condition, with a line saying which program the message goes to. Use + Add condition to narrow it to some of those people, for example only those who accept email. The line stays while that condition names the program, and goes when you change the program, remove the condition, or choose another audience. Taking away the last condition leaves the message with no audience, and it will not save until you add one.

If that section is turned off after you write a message to a program, the message reaches nobody and its portal notice stays a draft. Turn the section back on, or choose another audience.

If your club lets connected tools make changes, Claude or another connected tool can look through your newsletter subscribers (managers and admins only, as on the website). For the subscriber list:

• Unsubscribing someone asks you to confirm in the chat. It stops their newsletters at once.

• Adding an address, importing a pasted list, and subscribing someone again wait for approval on the website, from the person who asked, because they put addresses on the list your newsletters go to and can undo someone's unsubscribe. The approval for an import says how many addresses are new, how many were unsubscribed and would be subscribed again, and how many lines will be skipped.

Addresses on the blocked list still never get email, whatever happens to the subscriber list. See What Claude can and can't do here.