Notices are composed and managed in the Notices Module of your EZVolunteer site. If you are using our EZVolunteer/Basic system then you share these notices with other schools in your district, so it is important that you establish a naming standard for your notices to avoid confusion. If you use our EZVolunteer/Enterprise each school will have their own EZVolunteer website and has their own list of notices in their Notices Module.
Creating a notice is very similar to creating an email blast. There are a couple important differences, however.
First, because you are going to save the notice for tracking and reuse, you have to include some setup parameters not used when composing an email blast. Second, notices give you access to other channels, such as SMS and social media for getting your message out to volunteers.
To create a notice for communicating with your volunteers open the Notices Module from the left-side navigation menu and choose Add Notice. This displays a new notice add/edit page. You will need to set-up your notice by providing the following information.
Name - Type the name of the notice. If you are using EZVolunteer/Basic then you should include your school name in the name of the notice so other volunteers coordinators are not confused. The name will appear on the Notices List page after saving your work.
Description - This field is used both for preview text in the inbox of your email recipients, and as the summary that appears on the notice archive page.
Monitor Email - This can be one, or multiple email address (separated by commas) of people who you can send a test version of your notice before blasting it to your volunteers. This address will also receive a confirmation email when all messages have been sent.
Text - If your school district is using our optional SMS Text Messaging service you can send a test message to yourself before sending text messages to your volunteers.
Shared/Archive/Auto-Translate - These options allow you to SHARE this notice with other schools (only applies in Enterprise version), ARCHIVE this notice so website visitors can view at a later date, AUTO-TRANSLATE by adding language options at the top of our notice for ESL readers to click and view your message in their native language.
The section label HTML Email is where you type or cut-and-paste (paste using the Paste Tools) content to compose your message, in the same way you would in the email blast function. Below HTML Email there are other sections for composing an SMS Text message to send out with this notice and a Social Media section to compose Facebook and Twitter posts, which are posted when you send out your notice.
These sections, or channels, are not required, and you can SAVE your notice, after sending yourself a test message. Once you have set-up and composed your notice you can use it from your Volunteer List page or your Match Volunteers page. In both locations simply select the volunteers to whom you want to send the notice and use the Action menu to choose Send Notice.
After you send your notice to selected volunteers you can return to your Notices List and see the results of your message by clicking on the number in your Email column (the number of emails sent). From the results page you can tell how many messages were sent, bounced, opened and if anyone inactivated their account to stop receiving messages from the system.