Sending email blasts to members

Wild Apricot allows you to communicate with your members - you can easily send individualized emails to all members, any particular group of members or a single member. These mass emails are also known as 'email blasts'.

(There are also various automatically sent emails, such as renewal reminders, registration confirmations, event notices etc. Those are discussed in other articles on this Knowledge Base website)

Main features include:

• Send to the whole contact list or to any subset of your database (using Advanced search)
• Full HTML formatting of email, including links, pictures, rich formatting etc.
  • You can not send attachments within the email but you can insert a link to attachment loaded into your Wild Apricot site (See Inserting documents)
• Personalize with first name and last name
• Each contact (member) has a field in their profile to opt-in or opt-out of these ad-hoc emails:
  
• This field is originally set either based on the selection made on the Online member application form or during Import. Thereafter, it should normally be only changed by this contact him/herself - either by editing Profile or by clicking on the Unsubscribe link which is automatically added to each email footer. Administrators with access to editing member records can edit this field too - but be careful not to violate any applicable Privacy laws!

To send an email to all members, use [Email all members] button on the Members list page. To send an email to some members, use Advanced search and then [E-mail members] button.
In either case, the next screen will tell you how many people from your selection will be emailed (all who opted out or set to not receive any emails are automatically excluded) and allow you to create the message.
When you create an email you have two choices:
1. Create a new email from scratch, or
2. Use one of the previously sent emails.

When you click on [Copy previously sent...] button you will get a window where you can choose one of the previous emails.

Email would be copied over after you press on [Copy] button. You would probably want to make some minor adjustments to the email before sending it.

[Test e-mail] button allows you to send a test copy of the email to yourself (to the email specified in your settings in User list)
[Preview and send] is the final step before actually sending the email:

You would have to confirm that you want to proceed by clicking [OK] button

Log of the sent emails

You may review all of the email blasts that you have sent to your members. Go to Settings / Your Account / Log of email blasts.

Do the search and select an email in question by clicking on it.

Planned enhancements

We are planning a number of enhancements to this function. At the top of our list are: Ability to include additional fields from member records Feel free to comment at the bottom of this page regarding your usage of this function and any additional requests you have for this.