Emailing an Announcement

Overview of Sending

Announcements are aware of the current event. For example, Those with Completed Signups is shorthand for "Those with Completed Signups for the Current Event", and Chair1's Name is shorthand for "Name of Current Event's Chair1".

A completed signup is one whose status is other than Regrets, No Show, Pending, or Ready.

Message Creation

• If you saved a message in the Drafts folder and want to use it now, select it using the dropdown menu at the top of the page.
• Enter a subject, and if desired a message (up to 50,000 characters). If you want to send a message that needs to be personalized per recipient, or may change over time (which often matters for drafts and scheduled announcements), insert generic terms into the message.
• Enter the message's recipients, as described below. If you ever want to list each actual recipient or see how generic terms will be filled in, click on the Preview button.
• If you want the Send button to schedule delivery for later, rather than send the message immediately, click on When to Deliver... (admin only).

  Signup reminders are probably the most common use of scheduled messages. For example, to cause everyone to get a reminder message 3 days before any on-site schedule item they have committed to (as opposed to unapproved requests they might have):

  • When you write your message, put Insert Recipient's->Signups somewhere in it.
  • Set the TO field to Select a List->Those with Completed Signups.
  • Click on When to Deliver...
  • Click on the input field in the "Deliver n days before each on-site task" line, and enter 3.
  • Click on OK.

When you are satisfied with everything, click on the Send button.

Message Delivery

General:

• Messages to a list of people are sent BCC so that a Reply All cannot accidentally send unwanted messages to a large number of people.
• Sometimes a person who should receive a message has no email address. If there are any such people, they will be listed after you click on Send. You will also be given the opportunity to print their personalized messages, to facilitate contacting these people thru alternate means.
• If a recipient's email address is not a valid address, and this can be detected soon enough, PRESTO will email an error report to the message's From address.

To conform to Internet anti-spam/anti-phishing rules, PRESTO encapsulates a message's From address into an address ending in prestogem.com. This has two effects:

• Auto-responder replies and errors not detected by PRESTO are delivered to your group's webmaster.
• When a recipient uses a PRESTO message's From-field as the To-field of a new message — rather than simply doing a reply, the new message is delivered to your webmaster rather than to the sender.

Processing the Dynamic Aspects of a Message

The dynamic aspects of a message are dealt with when the message is delivered (or previewed). For example, if your TO-list was Those with Completed Signups, and more people signed up between when you created the message and when it was delivered, the new signups would also be sent the message.

This fact is particularly relevant to drafts and scheduled announcements, because they are often created long before they are delivered. Similarly, this fact means that a Preview is an approximation of what will be delivered. In terms of the previous example — additional signups may occur between preview and delivery of a message.

Identifying Recipients

You may put as many items in the TO-list as you wish. By clicking on an item, you can remove it (or if applicable, see its count or modify its search criteria).

To individually add someone, begin to enter her name or email address in the dynamic menu at the top left of the TO-list area. It can even be the email address of someone not in your people database.

To quickly add people based on their completed signups at the current event, begin to enter an activity or project name in the top center dynamic menu. (This menu is just a shortcut for adding activity-based Search Results.. — see below).

Some activity-based examples:

• If you had clerks in the locations Precinct 1 and Precinct 2, you could identify all the Precinct 1 clerks at once by entering Clerk, Precinct 1.
• Conversely, you could identify all clerks, regardless of location, by entering just Clerk.
• Similarly, you could identify all Precinct 2 workers by entering just Precinct 2.

To add categories of people, select an item in the dropdown menu at the top right of the TO-list area. The options you have here are as follows.

Pre-defined Lists of People

There are several pre-defined lists of people you can Send to:

• Everyone in Database is good for welcoming everyone to your PRESTO website and soliciting volunteers for your events (example message).
• Those Not Yet Signed Up is good for follow-up "Please Volunteer" announcements. It is everybody who has not done a signup for the current event.
• Those with Completed Signups is good for reminding people when to show up and for thanking them afterwards. It is equivalent to doing a Search and setting Status to Completed and Event Category to Current Event.
• Those with Unapproved Requests is good for reassuring people still waiting for a decision. It is equivalent to doing a Search of the current event for everybody with a Pending or Ready signup.

Search Results...

This adds the people who match a search to the TO-list. When a search includes any signup info, this means those people who have matching signups.

The nature of the search also affects which signups are displayed by !p.signups!, !p.signups_forms!, etc:

• If you enter no signup-info search criteria, they list the completed signups that each matching person has at the current event.
• If you enter any signup-info search criteria, they list only the signups that match all your criteria. (And depending on your Search criteria, this might include signups at other than the current event).

When search criteria are saved (i.e. you save a message draft), missing year information is filled in. That is, if you specify 1/1 and the year at that time is 2010, 1/1/2010 is saved. Additionally if you (later) schedule a message series, PRESTO converts When Activity Is actual dates (if any) into Today-relative dates. Within a scheduled series, Today means the date of the current delivery attempt.

The following example illustrates both points. If you schedule an every-day series on 4/1 and include a when-activity-is criteria of 4/8-4/15, this is stored as +7 thru +14. Then when the series is processed on say 4/5, the effective when-activity-criteria is 4/12-4/19.

Some more Search examples:

1. Enter an Address of City, ST to send to all the people in that city.
2. [For groups with a membership notion] Set Expires to a date range in the near future to remind people to renew their memberships.

People in a File... (Admin only)

This adds the people in the specified text file to the TO-list — not the file itself. This means changing a file after you store its message in the Drafts Folder does NOT change who was added to the TO-list.

A file can identify up to 2000 registered people and 100 unregistered people. But if any lines in the file contain bad info, an error will be reported and the file will not be added to the TO-list.

If you create the text file by hand (e.g. with Notepad), it should start with a header line containing name (although any string will do). Each subsequent line identifies a recipient, and may be either the name of a registered person or the email address of an unregistered person. However blank lines and lines starting with a ; are ignored.

You can also use any file that conforms to Import People's file layout rules (except that Note 1: Multi-Person Rows is not supported). This enables you to do an Export People, filter it outside of PRESTO, and send to who is left. It also enables you to import distribution lists exported from mail programs and the like.

When you use the Import People format, the name column is used if present. If not, the firstname, lastname, and mname columns are looked at. If the specified name is in your database, that information is used. Otherwise, any address in the email column is used.

Inserting Generic Terms

This is done using the Insert menus underneath the message box. It can be done in the subject as well as the message itself. However you must first click in the Subject's text box. Also the "big ones" like Coworkers or a Report are not allowed in a Subject.

Putting Per-Recipient Signup Info in Messages

The Insert each recipient's: dropdown menu includes these options:
  Signups [shows as !p.signups!] & Signups /w Forms [!p.signups_forms!].
These options enable one Send Announcement command to send per-recipient signup info to each recipient. For example, suppose you put Those with Completed Signups in the TO-list and sent the following message:

The result would be as follows:

• Only those people with at least one completed signup for the current event would get a copy of the message.
• Each copy would list only that recipient's completed signups for the current event.
• Listing a signup means showing the activity and date/time of its schedule item (plus its signup form values when Signups /w Forms was chosen).
• Any activity name that appears in the list will be a link to that activity's description (if it has one). (This gives you a way to make a confirmation or reminder offer activity-specific info to recipients, such as a map of where an activity is).

More generally, the rules for which signups to include are:

• Unless Signup Status is set in a Search command or otherwise stated below, only completed signups can match.
• The only way to match signups outside the current event is to do a Search command that sets Event Name or Event Category.
• If a person is identified in a way that does not look signup info (e.g. only by her name), all her completed signups from the current event are included.
• If a person is identified by signup info, only the signups that matched that info are included. For example, suppose your TO-list was the pre-defined list Those with Unapproved Requests. Then each recipient's !p.signups! would expand to her signups from the current event that have a status of Pending or Ready.
• The signups implied by all of a recipient's TO-list items are combined. For example, if you did one Search for workers at event1 and another for workers at event2, the signup list would include her signups from both events. Similarly having both a no-signup-info TO-list item and a Search for ANY SIGNUP STATUS item is the way to display all signups of everyone — including [No Signups] where applicable.
• When multiple people have the same non-blank Representing value or when there is a shared signup, a single signup can lead to multiple recipients. Conversely the signup list of each such recipient includes all those signups.

Other Per-Recipient Personalized Info

Besides basic info like the recipient's name, the Insert each recipient's: dropdown menu has these options:

• Coworkers [shows as !p.coworkers!].
  Inserts a header and table for each group of coworkers implied by this recipient's TO-list item. A coworker is anyone (at your location if any) whose work period overlaps yours by at least 20 minutes. For example, if the TO-list contains warden and this recipient is Warden, Precinct 1 from 7AM-1PM, the inserted info might look something like:

  Precinct 1. Aug 7, 7:00 - 1:00PM staff:

  Name1	email address	phone	Clerk	7:00-11AM
  Name2	email address	phone	Inspector	12:00-2PM
  And so on

  After inserting the !pcoworkers!, you can customize which columns to show if desired. For example, put (nat) before the trailing ! to only display the Name, Activity, and Time columns.

• Teammates [shows as !p.teammates!].
  Inserts a header and teammate table for each project implied by this recipient's TO-list item.

  After inserting the !p.teammates!, you can customize which columns to show if desired. For example, put (nep) before the trailing ! to only display the Name, Email, and Phone columns.

• Password [shows as !p.password!]
  Inserts a Password-info phrase into the message. This is for announcing to new people how to login. This generic term has to handle the different password policies and whether people have created their own passwords. So to avoid awkward phrasing in your message, you need to conform to the guidelines implied by this example.

Job Titles and the Like

Particularly when you save messages for later use, it can be useful to identify someone generically. For example, as shown above you might send some messages for each event that end with:

Thank you,
Jane Smith
Event Chair

If you save these messages, you do not have to re-type them for each event. But suppose Jane retires and someone takes her place. Now you have to go back and fix each such message. You can avoid this nuisance upfront by using the Insert dropdown menus to select Insert staff info->Chair1's Name — rather than typing Jane Smith — when you first create the message.

Insert Report dropdown menu

Particularly for scheduled messages, inserting reports is useful. For a party for example, you might want to send out a message that includes a report listing everyone who is coming and what food they are bringing.

Insert Link...

If your announcement is asking people to signup or the like, it is a good idea to include a link to your group's home page. You can also include links to non-PRESTO pages as well.

The Drafts folder

Saving a Draft of a Message

If you want to use the current message as the basis of a later Send, or you just do not have the time to finish writing it, click on a Save Draft button. This places it in the Drafts folder.

You have two options:

• Save current message sets the message's name to its subject. (When you do this command for a message that came from the Drafts folder, it is simply resaved with the same name as before).
• Save it as... sets the message's name to the name you enter.

Using a Draft Message

To display a message in the Drafts folder, select its name from the Start-with-message dropdown menu. You can now work on or send the message the same as if you had just created it from scratch.

To examine what is in the Drafts folder, click on Manage Email Folders in the top-of-page menus. From the Manage page, you can discard a saved announcement and see when you last edited it. You can also click on its Update icon if you want to modify what has been saved.