Getting Help

Messaging

Send emails to board members across your state PTA using saved Recipient Groups

Overview

Messaging lets you reach board members across your entire state PTA with a single email. Instead of building a mailing list by hand, you pick one or more Recipient Groups — saved, named audiences — and FutureFund Connect gathers the matching recipients for you.

State-level messaging includes a rich text editor, file attachments, a reply-to choice, and the option to send right away or schedule for later.

You’ll find Messaging in the navigation bar under your state PTA’s name.

Recipient Groups

A Recipient Group is a saved combination of filters that describes who should receive a message — for example, “All District Presidents” or “Peralta Council Boards.” Once you’ve built and saved a group, it’s available on every message you send from now on, so you don’t have to rebuild the same audience each time.

Four ready-made groups are available to every state PTA and can’t be edited or deleted:

  • All Board Members
  • District Board Members
  • Council Board Members
  • Unit Board Members

Building a Group

  1. From Messaging, click Manage Groups.
  2. Click to start a new group and give it a name (up to 100 characters).
  3. Add one or more filter rows. Each row has three parts: what to filter on, Is any of or Is not any of, and the values.
    • Position — one or more board roles (President, Treasurer, and so on).
    • Organization level — State PTA, Districts, Councils, Units (In-Council), Units (Out-of-Council).
    • District — one or more specific districts.
    • Council — one or more specific councils (narrows to the districts you’ve already picked, if any).
  4. Rows are joined with And — a board member must match every row to be included.
  5. Use Is not any of to exclude instead of include. For example, “Organization level is any of Units” And “District is not any of Peralta” reaches every unit board member outside Peralta District.
  6. As you add filters, a live count and a sample of up to five matching people (name, position, organization) update automatically, so you can check your work before saving.
  7. Click Save.

Editing or Deleting a Group

Open Manage Groups, then open any group you created to change its filters or delete it. The four predefined groups can’t be edited or deleted.

How to Send a Message

  1. Open Messaging from your state PTA navigation.
  2. Click Send Message to start a new email.
  3. Pick one or more Recipient Groups. The form shows how many unique people you’re about to reach and how many duplicates were removed — if someone matches more than one group (or more than one row within a group), they’re only emailed once.
  4. Choose the From/Reply-To address. This controls where replies go (see the options below).
  5. Enter a Subject (up to 150 characters).
  6. Write your message in the Body using the rich text editor. You can format text, add links, and structure your content.
  7. Add Attachments if you need to — click to expand the Attachments section, then attach your files (images, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and plain text or CSV files are all supported).
  8. Choose when to send: Send Now to send right away, or Send Later to pick a Send Date.
  9. Click Send.

Scheduled messages go out on a check that runs every few minutes, so a message set for 9:00 am arrives right around then.

From/Reply-To Options

The From/Reply-To setting decides where replies are sent. The choices you see depend on your setup, and may include:

  • Your organization’s own reply-to name and email, if one has been set up on the state PTA’s Edit page.
  • Your organization’s name with no-reply@futurefund.com (replies are not collected).
  • Your own name and email, so replies come back to you.

Test Before You Send

Before sending to everyone, you can send yourself a copy first.

  1. Fill out your message as usual.
  2. Click Send Test.
  3. FutureFund Connect emails the message to your own email address so you can review it.

Sending a test does not send the message to anyone else.

Scheduling a Message

  1. While composing, choose Send Later.
  2. Enter the Send Date (the date and time you want it to go out, in Pacific time).
  3. Click Send.

The message will be delivered automatically at the time you chose. Until it goes out, you can open it from your Messaging list and Edit or Delete it.

Reviewing Sent Messages

  • Your Messaging list shows messages with the most recent first, including any still scheduled.
  • Open a sent message to see summary counts: Recipients, Delivered, Opened, Clicked, Bounced, Unsubscribed, and Spam.
  • Click View Recipients to see the per-person breakdown — exactly who received, opened, clicked, or bounced.
  • Messages sent before Recipient Groups launched keep showing the original audience they were sent to.

Attachments

  • You can attach images, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and plain text or CSV files.
  • Each file can be up to 10MB, and the whole message including attachments must stay under about 13MB. Connect tells you before sending if it’s too large.

Tips

  • Save a Recipient Group for any audience you message often — you’ll only have to build the filters once.
  • Watch the live count and sample while building a group to make sure it’s catching who you expect.
  • Use Send Test to preview formatting and attachments before sending to your whole audience.
  • Groups match board members in the current term, so a statewide message is only as complete as your units’ rosters.
  • For compliance reminders, pair a message with a task so you can send the reminder and track who completes it.
  • Statewide emails reach a large audience and cannot be recalled once sent, so review carefully before clicking Send.

Was this helpful?