Rock U - Communications - Communication Templates

Transcribed Video Content

Emails should look they came from your organization instead of having a blank white box. We'll show you how easy it is to really customize the content of these communications and make it easy so that your staff always have a starting point when they're sending a new message. Okay, let's find our communication templates. So head to admin tools up to settings and start typing in communication templates. You'll see we have templates and categories. Let's look at the categories first. So if you wanna start grouping the templates that you're saving, it's easy to do that just using categories. You can even secure each one individually. You can do things adding a category for people on the communication team or even adding a category for the pastoral staff and just putting the templates that are relevant to them under that category. Let's head back to communications and click on the templates. We've got quite a few that come out of the box here. It's easy to add a new one if you'd or even copy an existing one. And I already did that here. So I copied our default template and made one called default two. Let's click through it and just see what it looks . So we've given it a name and a description. Also here, you can pick whether this template is starter, meaning it's easier to access when you're on the communication wizard for example, it'll be pins to the top. Now you can also pick the category and the template preview image. So this is pretty important. I don't have one here, but I suggest you create one if you're gonna use this often. And I'll show you where that pops up later, so keep that in mind. Now we can set up our template for email, SMS, and push. We don't have push notifications set up here, but you can still fill it out and this is using a Rock mobile app. But let's go to the email. So you can pick a from name, address and subject if you wanna have something persistent showing up. If you wanna hard code it essentially, but you can still change it once you get to the actual communication. It just makes it easier if you're always using the same address for this sort of communication. You can also add attachments that will show up by default and you can add a logo. Now I've already edited this template here and you can easily see what it's gonna look on mobile or desktop making it really easy to do review. But there's two ways to edit these. You can either edit it using HTML and Lava. And that's if how to write emails using HTML. We do have some documentation on that if you're interested. But if you want an easy drag and drop option, you can click on the email builder here and you're taken straight to Rock's drag and drop email editor. You can add all sorts of different blocks, sections that you've saved or that come out of the box, and you can style them really specifically so that this looks your organization. Now I've just added some simple blocks. We'll click apply design here and keep this saved. Now you can also add some things to make it simpler for communications in the future for SMS. For example, we could say, hello, and then we can click personalize if we want to add a merge field. And let's just look for the first name merge field. We'll add it and Rock will populate that for you and you'll see how this works in just a moment. You can also pick the number you wanna use if you want it set up to be easier. You can edit the push notification too, but let's click save and we'll go straight to the wizard. So head to people, down to new communication. We've got a few screens to click through here. So let's just make this a test and we'll just pick a list. We'll pick personal preference and let's move ahead of this. Now we are on the actual template screen and you can easily actually sort here by category. Another good reason to use categories. Then we can see that default to template showing up. Now earlier I mentioned the template preview image. You can see we have some more specific ones for the default or the sidebar template. And they give you an idea of what the message is actually gonna look before you start editing the message. So this is really nice for people that have never used that template so they know what they're getting into before they pick a template. Also adding a nice description is helpful. We'll click next and skip through this. Okay. We've got our email settings. We'll click next and here we go. So we can immediately see that beautiful drag and drop template that we've made for our emails making it simpler so we don't have to go back and redo this in the future. It's easy to just get in and edit and send. Then we'll go to the SMS editor and there we go. We can actually see that merge field we added. Everything is showing up in the message body here and our Lava is working and it's really easy for us to just get ready and send it. And we don't have a push notification set up right now, but we would be able to see that if we had push notifications set up. And then from here, can immediately just go and send These templates make sending so much easier. A good template turns a blank page into a quick send. Remember, these are assets. When you build a new one of these templates, you build it once, you never have to build it again.