(GS-8) Sending Messages
Let's take a look now at how to send the main types of messages you will want your attendees to receive... these break down into Payment Reminder messages for each lead attendee, and various types of information messages for all the attendees.
Messages about payments which are due are normally sent from the Bookings - Payments section:
When a payment becomes due, a button appears in the Payments Due column allowing you to send the Payment Reminder message specific to that booking. There is also an option which you can set on a per activity basis which allows Workshop Angel to send these messages automatically. You can read more details about this in the chapters 5 and 6 of the documentation.
You will have the idea from previous chapters of the Getting Started guide, that there various different types of messages which Workshop Angel sends during the booking process. Some are sent just to the main contact about payment, and others are sent to each attendee about their attendance.
As time passes from the point of booking to the time of the activity, you may need to send other messages to the main contact about payments which are due, or to all attendees about the activity itself. This chapter looks at how these messages are sent out.
As the time of your activity approaches, and also once it has finished, there are probably going to be messages that you want to send to all your attendees. Workshop Angel automatically creates three templates from which you can create content for these kind of messages, plus the ability to create any number of your own customised messages in addition.
The three attendee message templates are named as follows:
- Joining Instructions - a message you may send out a few weeks before the activity with the main details of things like where to go, what to expect, and what to bring with you.
- Just Before - a message you may send out a few days before with a final details you want to inform and remind your attendees about.
- Just After - a message you may send out a few days after the activity to follow up on things that were discussed and mention other activities you are running.
All of the attendee messages are send from the Bookings area.
- Click on Bookings - Messages
- Choose the Yoga Retreat activity on the left hand side
Here you will see the three messages we have mentioned are listed on the right, along with the Place Booked message which we saw was sent during the booking process. You can see that the Place Booked message is shown as "Sent", but the other three messages are shown as "5 Unsent". Let's send the Joining Instructions message to all the attendees now.
- Click on [Send Unsent] next to the Joining Instructions message listing.
There will be a short moment where the button contains a spinning circle and says "Sending", and then a few moments later the message will be listed as "All Sent".
That's it! The message has been sent to all your attendees.
Like with the payment messages, there is also an option available for these attendee messages to be automatically sent. In this case you can set a time for them to be sent, and then to be sent automatically to all attendees who book after that time. This is discussed in detail in Chapter 5.
As we discussed in the "Adding Your First Attendee" lesson, you can go to the Messages area and view the messages sent:
- Click on Messages - Sent Messages
- Click on an individual message to see the contents.
You now have a really good overview of how the main messages can be sent from within Workshop Angel. There are lots of other places you can send more individual messages to your contacts and attendees:
- Contact List view
- Bookings - Attendees screen
- Bookings - Responses screen
You can learn about sending messages from these locations in more detail in chapter 6 of the documentation.
So now you know what Workshop Angel is, how to add attendees to activities, and how to manage their payments and messages.
That is all well and good, but how do you define one of these Activities and all their details?
Read on to the next chapter to find out...