Managing Category Lists

The front page of the Mass Contact administration tools is simply a list of available mailing lists. Upon your first visit it will obviously be empty since no lists are yet configured.

The administrator can have as many categories as necessary, however, be aware there is really no reason to have more categories than you have roles. When you create mass mailings, you can assign the mailing to be sent to one or many available lists.

With that being said, if you have a single category for each role, you can assign any given communication to be sent to a single role of user, or any selection of roles. Therefore, having one category for each role would give you the easiest flexibility in distribution. You are allowed to do it any way you see fit.

Adding Categories

This is a simple form to use in order to populate the categories list.

All the form requires is a name for the category, and selecting which role/roles are assigned to receive emails sent to that category. You also have the option to set any one category as a default selection option.

This default selection option just sets the Mass Contact composition form to default to selecting that category/categories. If you send the majority of your communications to a single category, this can make it easy to get composed and sent as the category is already selected. If you are composing an email for another category or set of categories, simply deselect the default and select the needed category/categories.

When setting a category as the default selected option, there is also a checkbox to deselect all the others from default in case you are changing the default to a new category, as opposed to adding another to the default selected option(s).

Settings

This is how you want Mass Contact to behave. You have the option of setting the following data and/or behaviors:

• Information to display over the Mass Contact form that can contain instructions, requirements, ofr similar information you must give to all Mass Contact users.
• From names and email addresses that the Mass Contact messages are said to be sent from.
• Automatic prepend and append messages for all messages sent through the system. These can be used for unsubscribe information, copyright info, required messaging from the organization and the like.
• What character set to send as.
• Max number of recipients before splitting messages.
• Whether or not to allow recipients to opt-out.
• Whether or not to BCC recipients.
• Whether or not to include the category in the subject line.
• Whether to send as HTML be default.
• Whether to save the communication as a content node for later publishing on the web site.
• Whether or not communication composers to override a few of the above settings such as from name and email, HTML default sending, node savings and the like.

Once the settings are entered and at least one category is added, you are ready to start using Mass Contact. However, you can set up as many categories as you need.

How you categorize and use Mass Contact is complete dictated by you, the size of your group, the number and sensitivity of the messages and much more. Some information being sent to content admins can be seen by system admins, but system admin messages you may not want seen by anyone else, for example. Be very careful what you share with who, most especially in very large organizations where roles are very distributed.

Sending Email

Before sending any email through this system a few things need to be done. First, you need to go to the navigation menu at "Administer > Menus > Navigation" and enable the "Mass contact" menu item, and drag it to wherever you want it in the hierarchy of the menu. Personally, we recommend putting it in the "Create content" menu as a submenu item.

After that is completed, you need to make sure that the users you want to be able to send to any given category have permissions to do so. Each category that is created has it's own access permission. This can seem somewhat overkill to a small group user, but in larger organization this is a very powerful feature.

After those tasks are completed, any user with permission to access any category can go to "Administer > Create content > Mass contact" and send email to one or many of the categories that said user has permissions to send to.

Add your name and email address, if you are allowed to override the admin settings, enter the subject, compose the message, select the input type for the content and select one or more categories of users you wish to send the message to.

Based on the permissions of any given user and the configuration of the Mass Contact module any message may have other options, such as "from" name and email overrides, whether or not to send as text or HTML, uploading files, save the message as a node of content and more.