What Messaging Does

Messaging emails the people connected to your event. Use it for reminders the night before, directions and parking notes, changes of plan, and thank-yous afterward. You can send to everyone who responded, to your address books, or both.

Messages go out from your name, and replies come back to your email address.

Who Receives a Message

On the message form, under Who should get this message?, you choose who it goes to. You need to pick at least one.

Everyone who responded is checked to start:

• On Show Up!, Bring It!, and Sign Up! events — everyone who responded, including people who answered No
• On Gift It! events — everyone whose contribution was paid

Address books sends the message to everyone in the books you pick. This is how you reach people who were invited but haven’t responded yet. See Address Books.

Nobody gets two copies. If someone is in more than one book, or they responded and are also in a book you picked, they get one email. Email addresses are compared without regard to capital letters. If a person responded, the message is addressed with the name they gave your event.

Choosing Address Books

1. On the message form, tick the Address books checkbox.
2. A window opens with your address books. Check the ones you want. If you have more than eight, a search box at the top helps you find them.
3. Close the window. The names you picked show under the checkbox.

Click Change to pick different books. Unticking Address books clears your choices. Books synced from FutureFund work just like the ones you built yourself.

If an address book you picked is deleted before you save, HelpOut asks you to choose again rather than quietly sending to fewer people.

Writing a Message

1. Open your event and click Messages.
2. Click Send Message.
3. Fill in the Subject (up to 150 characters). It’s pre-filled with your event title.
4. Choose who gets it.
5. Write the Body. You can use formatting, links, and lists.
6. Choose when to send it.
7. Click Save.

Before it goes out, HelpOut asks you to confirm that the message will be sent to the people you picked. The Messages tab shows who each message went to, such as “Respondents + Friends and Family.”

Send Now or Send Later

Send Now queues the message immediately. It goes out within a few minutes.

Send Later reveals a Scheduled Send Date field. Pick the date and time and HelpOut sends it then. Scheduled messages are checked every five minutes, so delivery starts within about five minutes of the time you set.

Times use the time zone on your profile. See Account and Security.

Sending Yourself a Test

Click Send Test on the message form and HelpOut emails the message to you alone, exactly as your recipients will see it. Nothing is sent to anyone else, and the message isn’t saved or scheduled by testing it. Testing doesn’t change who a saved message goes to.

Worth doing whenever you’ve included a link or a lot of formatting.

Editing and Deleting

Open a message from the Messages tab to read it.

A message that hasn’t been sent yet can still be edited or deleted. Once a message has been sent it can’t be edited, deleted, or unsent — the emails are already gone. The Messages tab keeps sent messages as a record of what you told people and when.

If People Reply

Replies go to the email address on your FutureFund account. HelpOut doesn’t have an inbox — conversations happen in your regular email.