Email your members and attendees

When you want to send your members an announcement, remind an event's attendees of something, or send a survey once an event is over, you mail them from Gathin. The mail goes out in your community's name, and afterwards you can see who opened it and who clicked.

This article is about the mail you send. For the registration and comment digests Gathin sends you about your event, see Emails your event sends you.

The Mailing page

In the community admin panel, open the Mailing page in the Communication group. New mail, beside the title, starts a new mail.

The bar at the top of the page shows your monthly mail allowance: how many mails you have used this month, how many are left, and the day the allowance resets. Under it, the Campaigns and automatic mail chart shows how much of the mail in the period you picked was written by an admin, and how much the platform sent on its own.

The page has two tabs. From the time range menu on the right you pick Last 30 days, Last 7 days, Last 90 days or All time.

• Campaigns: The mails you and the other admins sent. At the top, the Sent, Delivered, Opened and Clicked cards give the totals and the rates. You can narrow the list with the Search by subject box, or by picking a status (Scheduled, Queued, Sending, Sent, Cancelled) from the Any status menu. If more than one person in the community has sent mail, a menu that filters by sender appears beside it as well. Each row shows how many recipients the mail went to, how many it was delivered to, how many people opened and clicked it, and who sent it; when it is scheduled you see when it goes out, and when addresses bounced or people unsubscribed you see those counts too.
• Automatic mails: The mail Gathin sends in your community's name on its own, such as ticket confirmations, event reminders and date-change notices. They are grouped by kind of mail; open one to see which event it was about and how many people it reached, and See everyone this reached lists the people. These mails are only counted; there is no open or click tracking for them.

The mails you send to an event's attendees are not kept anywhere separate: they are listed here too, on the Campaigns tab.

A campaign's details

Press a mail in the list and its details open: the recipient, delivery, open and click counts, the Most-clicked links, and the list of recipients one by one. You can filter that list with All, Opened, Clicked, Delivered, Bounced and Not sent. Opens are approximate; clicks are the firmer signal.

Preview mail opens the mail as recipients see it. When the mail is queued or scheduled, Edit and Cancel appear here as well; a mail that is still sending can be cancelled too (see below).

Write a new mail

Press New mail and the composer opens full screen: the settings on the left, a live preview on the right. You go through two steps, Content and Recipients. Cancel at the top takes you back to the Mailing page.

In the Content step:

• Header image (optional): Upload image puts a wide image at the very top of the mail.
• Title: The mail's subject and the large heading at the top. Keep it short and clear.
• Message: The body text. You can use bold or italic text, lists and links.
• Button (optional): Pick No button, Custom URL or Link a form. With Custom URL you enter a Button label and a Button URL; with Link a form you pick one of your community's forms and the button goes to that form's page.

When you are ready, Next takes you to the Recipients step.

Preview

The Preview on the right shows everything you write inside the template recipients will see, and it updates as soon as you stop typing. With the desktop and phone icons above it you can check how the mail looks on a wide screen and on a phone.

Choose the recipients

In the Recipients step you build the list of who gets the mail by adding people from several sources. Everything you add is combined, and no one is added twice.

• All members: Add all members adds everyone in your community.
• Segment: Pick a segment and press Add segment; everyone in that segment is added. For setting segments up, see Segments.
• Event: Pick an event. If you like, narrow it by ticket type (All ticket types) and by check-in (Checked-in, Not checked-in), then press Add attendees. Cancelled and refunded tickets do not count.
• Search: Search people by name and add them one at a time.

The Event source also lists the campaigns you sent before. Tick one or more of them under Exclude people who already got: and whoever received them is left out of this add. That way you can, for example, send a reminder only to the people who registered after your first mail.

The people you picked are listed underneath with their count; you can take one off, or start over with Clear all. The mail only goes to people with an email address, so the number actually sent can be lower than the number you picked.

Schedule and send

Under the Recipients step sits Sending tips. Here Gathin warns you if you are mailing very often, if a lot of addresses bounced on your last send, if your subject is full of capital letters or exclamation marks, if the message has a lot of links, or if you are sending to a very large list in one go. These are only suggestions; they never stop you sending.

Enter a date and time under Schedule (optional) and the mail goes out around that time (±10 minutes). Leave it empty and it is sent within about 10 minutes.

Send at the top becomes available once there is a title, a message and at least one recipient. Press it and Gathin asks Send this mail?, telling you how many people it will go to and that, until it goes out in about 10 minutes, you can still edit or cancel it on the Mailing page; confirm with Send now. If you entered a time, it asks Schedule this mail? instead, says when the mail goes out and that you can edit or cancel it until then, and you confirm with Schedule. The Mail queued window (Mail scheduled, with the time it goes out, for a scheduled mail) then shows how many recipients you picked, how many it will reach, how many were skipped because they have no email address, and which address the mail goes out from. Done takes you back to the Mailing page.

Your mail allowance

Every community has a monthly mail allowance that depends on its plan. You see what is left both on the Mailing page and in the Recipients step, next to the number of people you picked. When the allowance runs low, See plans appears beside it.

A mail that would go to more people than you have left is not sent at all; it never goes out halfway. Gathin opens the Not enough mail allowance window: Pick fewer people takes you back to the recipients, and See plans lets you upgrade. For the allowance on each plan and when it resets, see Billing and limits.

Drafts

As soon as you start writing, the mail is kept as a draft on this device. If you try to leave without sending, Gathin asks You haven't sent this mail: Keep editing, Discard or Save draft.

Saved drafts sit at the top of the Campaigns tab on the Mailing page, under Drafts on this device. Press one to pick up where you left off; the trash icon deletes it. When you open the composer again and a half-written draft is waiting, Gathin asks Continue your draft?; choose Use draft or Discard.

Drafts are kept on that device only. They are not there when you open the panel from another computer, and other admins do not see them.

Edit or cancel a mail that has not gone out

Open a queued or scheduled mail in the list and press Edit, and the Edit mail screen opens. Change the title, the message, the button, the recipients or the time, then press Save changes; the change is saved straight away. The header image stays as it is unless you pick a new one.

To stop a mail, press Cancel; Gathin asks Cancel this campaign?, and you confirm with Cancel campaign. A queued or scheduled mail stops before anything goes out. On a mail that has started sending, whatever has already gone out stays sent and the rest is not sent. Cancelling cannot be undone.

Mail an event's attendees

To write only to the people coming to one event, open the Participant Mailing page in the Promotion & outreach group of the event's admin panel. The same composer opens, with the event's name in its title.

The difference is in the recipients: here there are only the Attendees and Search sources. Under Attendees the event is already chosen; narrow by ticket type and check-in if you want, and press Add attendees. You can leave out the people who got an earlier campaign from here too.

After sending you return to the event's panel. The mail is listed on your community's Mailing page, alongside your other campaigns.

Post-event survey

When an event is over, there is a ready-made flow for asking the people who came how it went.

For 24 hours after the event ends, a strip with the event's name appears across the top of the admin panel: it says "ended", and Send the survey takes you to the survey. The strip does not appear while the event-day strip is showing, once you have already created the survey form, or after you dismiss it. Once the strip is gone, the Post-event survey button at the top of the event's Overview page is always there. Like mailing the participants, the survey belongs to the community that created the event: a co-host community's admins do not get the button, and the survey page tells them it is view only.

The survey has two steps:

1. Prepare the form. The form editor opens filled in from the feedback template: an overall rating for the event, what they liked most, what could be better, and whether their comments may be quoted. Change the questions as you like, then press Create and publish and confirm with Publish in the Ready to publish? summary.
2. Send the mail. As soon as the form is created the composer opens, with the title "How was event name?", a short thank-you message and an Answer the survey button to the form ready to go. In the Recipients step press Add attendees; to ask only the people who actually came, pick Checked-in first. Every field stays editable, and sending works just like any other mail.

When you come back to the survey later, the first step is skipped and the composer opens directly. The form is saved as "event name - Post Event Survey", and that name is how Gathin recognises the survey; if you rename the form, Gathin no longer finds it and offers to prepare a new one. The survey is not linked to the event, so it never takes the place of the registration form. You read the answers in the form's results — see Reading form responses.

In the app

In the Gathin app's organizer mode you can also write mail, see your campaigns and send the survey. The composer is one scrolling page instead of two steps, and you open the preview with the eye icon at the top. The app's survey page also lists the form and its responses, and the mail opens from the send button there. Drafts are kept separately on each device, so a draft you started on the web does not appear in the app.