FutureFund offers two messaging channels you compose and send yourself, Email and Text Messaging, plus a System Emails tab where you can preview the automatic emails FutureFund sends on your behalf and turn off a few optional reminders. All three are found in the Admin under Channels > Messaging. See Messaging for an overview of what each tab can do, including how to manage those optional reminders.

Email Audiences

When you write an email, first choose a Section, then narrow down who gets it. Some sections only appear once they apply to the school year you’re viewing.

• Campaigns: People who bought from the campaigns you select.
• Pledge-A-Thons: People in a pledge campaign. Choose Participants (signed up), Participants (invited), Supporters (with a donation) or Supporters (invited, without a donation). Shows when you have a pledge campaign.
• Waitlist: People on the waitlist for the campaign you select. Shows when a campaign allows a waitlist.
• First Step: Parents, narrowed by one of these:
  • Parents (completed)
  • Parents (in progress)
  • Parents with a student in the grade: pick one or more grades. Shows when your First Step asks for grade.
  • Parents with a student assigned to the teacher: pick one or more teachers. Shows once you’ve added teachers.
  • Parents with directory access
  • Parents without Directory access
• Memberships: Members of the membership campaigns you select. Shows once you have at least one membership.
• Volunteers: Volunteers in the positions you select. Shows once you have volunteers.
• Corporate Matching: Parents in the corporate matching program. Choose Payment pending or Payment received. Shows when corporate matching is turned on.

To email every parent who has finished First Step, choose First Step, then Parents (completed).

Agreeing to text messages is separate from email. A parent who has not opted in to texts still receives your emails normally, and opting out of texts never removes anyone from an email audience.

Text Message Audiences

Text messages support two audiences:

• All Parents: Every registered parent who has opted in to text messages and has a mobile number on file.
• A phone number question on a custom form: Every person who answered that phone number question, for example the coaches or room parents who signed up through a form. Each phone number question on each of your custom forms is listed as its own audience.

Text messages are opt-in. Parents agree to receive them by checking “I agree to receive text messages” during First Step or later from My Account, and an admin can set this on the parent record. Parents who have not opted in, or who do not have a valid 10-digit mobile number on file, are skipped.

Seeing Who Has Opted In

Before you write a text, it helps to know how many families you can actually reach.

• One parent at a time: Open the parent from their student’s page and look at the Text Messages row on the parent detail page. See Students.
• Everyone at once: On the Students page, click Actions > Export Parents. The CSV includes a Text Messages column with Yes or No for each parent, so you can sort or filter it in Excel or Google Sheets.

Keep in mind that the export lists parents who are still working through First Step alongside those who finished. Only parents who opted in and finished First Step receive your texts, so the number of Yes rows can be slightly higher than the number of parents your message reaches.

If the count is lower than you expected, it usually means the opt-in checkbox is easy to miss on your First Step form rather than that families do not want to hear from you. Mentioning it in a First Step reminder email is often enough to move the number.

Composing a Text Message

1. In the Admin, navigate to Messaging > Text Messaging
2. Click the New Message button
3. Select the recipients
4. Write the message (250 characters maximum)
5. Optionally set a Send At date and time to schedule the message
6. Click Save

Your organization’s text prefix is added to the front of every message and “Reply STOP to opt out” is added to the end, so keep the message itself short. Set the prefix in Account Settings > Messaging. See Messaging Setup.

Scheduling a Message

Not ready to send right this second? Both emails and text messages can be scheduled to go out later instead of right away.

• Emails: When composing an email, use the Send At date and time picker in the Schedule section, then click Schedule instead of Send. Scheduled emails show a yellow “Scheduled” badge with their send time in your email list, and you can keep editing them until they go out. Use Cancel Schedule to return one to a draft.
• Text messages: When writing a new text message, the Send At field is optional. Leave it blank to send right away (the default), or set a future date and time to schedule it. You can edit or cancel a scheduled text message from its detail page anytime before it sends.

Scheduled messages are delivered automatically, based on your organization’s time zone, usually within a minute of the time you chose.

Messaging Rules

A few things to keep in mind:

• Do not spam your users. Send relevant information based on their purchases or interests.
• By default, emails are sent from an unmonitored email address. Please do not instruct recipients to reply to the email unless the Reply-To address is set. See Messaging Setup.
• If a user requested to unsubscribe they will not receive additional emails.
• Text messages may only link to futurefund.com addresses. Links to other sites are rejected, because carriers block unfamiliar and shortened links.
• Text messages cannot use excessive capital letters or excessive emoji. Both are treated as spam signals by carriers and will be rejected.
  • Capital letters: A message is rejected when more than half of its letters are capitals. Messages with fewer than 10 letters are not checked.
  • Emoji: A message can include up to 5 emoji.
• Text messages are checked against a list of words and phrases that phone carriers screen for. The list covers topics like gambling, alcohol, tobacco and vaping, cannabis and other drugs, weapons, adult content, lending, and common spam phrases. A message that contains one is rejected with “Message contains words that aren’t allowed”. A word only counts when it appears on its own, not inside a longer word, and capitalization doesn’t matter. The full list is not published.

If a text message is rejected, reword it and try again.

Opting Out/Unsubscribing

Parents have the option to opt out of emails sent by admins in FutureFund by clicking the unsubscribe link in the email. The unsubscribe list is global and applied to all schools. Parents do not need to unsubscribe at each individual school.

Unsubscribing does not apply to transactional emails (e.g., order receipts, lost passwords, etc.). You can preview all of these automatic emails yourself under Messaging > System Emails, and turn off a few optional reminders if you’d rather not send them. See Messaging for the list of reminders you can switch off.

For text messages, every message ends with “Reply STOP to opt out”. A parent who replies STOP will not receive additional text messages.

Checking Who Received an Email

You can see exactly who an email was sent to.

1. In the Admin, click Messaging, then click the Email tab.
2. In the Email Messages list, click the email you sent. The list shows only the emails for the school year you are viewing.
3. The email’s page shows totals for Delivered, Opens, Clicks, Unsubscribe, Bounce and Spam.
4. Click Recipients to see every address the email was sent to. Each row shows Email, Delivered, Opened, Clicked, Unsubscribed, Bounced and Spam.

If someone is not on the Recipients list, the email was not sent to them. There are two common reasons:

• They unsubscribed. An unsubscribe covers emails from every school and group on FutureFund, not just yours.
• They were not in the audience. Check the audience you chose when you wrote the email.

Most audiences, such as members, come from the school year you were viewing when you created the email. For example, an email to members created while viewing last school year won’t reach members who joined only this school year.