Rock U - Communications - Communication Wizard

Transcribed Video Content

The communication wizard in Rock makes really complex messages look simple. That's because it steps you through a series of tools that help you create polished on brand messages and get them to the right people. You can even pick templates to make this process faster, and you can use a drag and drop email builder to build beautiful, polished, on brand emails as well. Let's step through the communication wizard and create a message right now. To start, let's go to people, then scroll down and click new communication. Then we're gonna name this communication community outreach and pick a topic of events and registrations. Then if you wanna edit the topics you have available to you, you'd simply go to admin tools, settings, then defines types, and pick communication topics. Then you can add new topics, remove them, or edit. And this is just what comes out of the box in Rock. Then when you're picking a communication list, you can either do a manual list. And what that looks is you can click view list, search for people, and manually add them. And you can see some details on the recipients here, but we actually want to use a data view or a communication list here. So here's our list. And if we wanna get more specific about who's receiving this message, we can pick segments, which are just another, data view that is filtered through a personalization segment, and you can pick this will narrow down the list of people that this communication is being sent to. And you can also pick whether you want recipients to meet all segment filters or any, but we're gonna remove these for now so we get a broad group of people receiving. And you can pick whether this is a bulk communication or not. This is important to keep people from marking your communications as spam. Or if it's a bulk communication, it won't be sent to people that have mass messages turned off. You can also select prevent duplicate email or SMS addresses. We're not gonna do that right now, though. And when you're picking the mediums that you're sending to, you can see what audience you have available to you, but we're gonna pick personal preference. So depending on the communication style that someone has set as their preference, that's the communication they're gonna receive. You can also pick if you want the message to send now or at a defined time later. We want it to send now, though. And if you wanna switch to a simple communication, you would just pick use simple editor. But we're gonna move on by clicking next, and that's the beauty of the wizard. You can just keep moving on very quickly and set up a nice message. But we have a couple templates available to us, And we have another Rock you video and more documentation on how to add new templates and what these templates look in their setup and more. You can even pick categories for templates, but we're gonna start off with just a blank template. Now we will set up the settings for an email. We'll just say it's from Ted Decker, and his email is Ted@RockSolidChurchDemo.com. Then the email subject is gonna be community outreach. You can add preview text if you want people to see preview text on the email they get sent, but we'll skip that. And you can also add attachments here. To set up a more complex email, you can also pick a reply to address, a CC list, and a BCC list. We're gonna move on, though. And this is one of the best parts of the communication wizard is our beautiful drag and drop email editor. So there are many different blocks that you can drag into here, and you can start really tailoring a communication. You can keep it on brands, and you can add many different content components. And you can structure an email in many different ways. So it's really flexible. There's many different column layouts you can pick from. And to edit any of these, you would just click on the block, And there's many different settings, even spacing and borders for title, for the title block, for example. Then if you want to clone a block, you can just click clone or you can delete it that. And if you want to do some more intense setup, you can actually create sections. And this can be something you could set up a branded hero. Just drag it in whenever you want. And if you ever want to save a section, all you have to do is click on a layout that you have and then save that layout. And you can make your own section here, but we're not gonna do that right now. And in styling, you can pick all kinds of things such as body width, color, how you want everything to be aligned, the margins, even what goes in the background if you would to add an image, how text is styled, whether it's globally or even by things such as the headings or paragraph text. You can style all the buttons, and you can style dividers. And this is all global here. You can also do the same settings changes by clicking on a button, for example, and you can pick for this specific button what the styling looks . So there's lots of really powerful styling editing that you can do here. And if you're liking your message, but you wanna see how it really looks, you can actually send a test and just pick an email. It'll go right away to that email. Or if you wanna preview what this message looks , click the preview button. And if you have lava, you can see what it looks depending on the person that you're looking at. You can even do the same for a segment in some cases, and you can see what it looks on desktop or even on a mobile device. Then you can full screen if you'd , or you can save this as a draft at any point. You can also save this entire message as a template, which this is really powerful. It'll help you skip some steps in the future, but I'm gonna style this message and skip ahead. We've got a nice email set up here with an image, and we have some lava plus a button to help you take action on this event. But we'll show what this looks with the lava rendered right here. So now you can see, dear Ted, we have Ted Decker as the preview person, and this email is tailored directly to him. Now we've got a nice email. Let's move on to the next medium, which is SMS. And we can create a quick SMS message here. Great. We have it set up, and you can pick which number you wanna send this from. And then for messages, you have a couple options such as you can add emojis if you'd . You can personalize by adding lava, and there's a really nice picker here that helps you quickly come up with the lava that you can use. And you can also create a short link to add here so that people can take action based off your message, and you can add attachments. Once you have a message set up, we can see a preview of exactly what this will look for the recipient. Now that's it for SMS. To show you what it looks for a push notification, we actually didn't have anyone in our communication list with push notification set up. But if we did have it, this is exactly what it would look . You can pick the application here that you want to send a push notification for. You can select the title, make a nice push message, and it has some of the same features as SMS where you can personalize and add emojis. Then after that, you'll pick an open action. This determines what happens when someone clicks on the push notification, and you can pick a specific page with a deep link. You can open the home page, or you can show some details some additional information here. And you must have a Rock mobile app set up in order to do this. Let's go back. We're back to the SMS editor. Now to finish this all off, we'll click review and confirm, and we get tons of detail on the email, SMS, both of the messages that we set up, and we can see exactly what they look , who they're going to, all that. And if you just wanna stop here, you don't actually wanna send, you can pick save as draft. But when you're ready to finish off this whole experience, just click send, and it'll say, are you sure? Click confirm. Then you'll see this message if it's ready to go, and it'll be queued for sending. Then you can pick whether you want to get the performance analytics sent to you in an email, and you can pick how many days from now. That's it. If you're wanting to go back and create another communication with the wizard, restart this whole process, you can click create new communication. I hope you're encouraged by how the communication wizard uses the magic of Rock to make complex communications feel simple to send. If you wanna learn more about communications in Rock, please watch our other Rock U videos on the concept. Thank you for watching.