MSU Extension Organizational Development

Within 4-H Online, users have the ability to broadcast emails to many recipients at one time. I'm going to walk you through the steps to create your distribution list and then develop your broadcast email within this video.When you log into 4-H Online, you typically will start at your member search area. On the screen, you will see there is a button that says Broadcast. This same button can be seen in several locations throughout 4-H Online, including the member search page, on your enrollment page, within your events, it's over here on the right, and this broadcast button will broadcast to those who have already registered for this event. You can check that list under this registration tab, but it is found in the details section. You can find the same broadcast button on the participation search screen.Within clubs, you have to open a club and then it will broadcast to the current enrolled members for that club. And then in custom reports, if you open a report, you will see the broadcast button available here and it will send to all of the results that are returned within that custom report.While we are in this custom report section, I'm going to bring your attention to this family email addresses shared report. You should be able to find this in one of your folders. There should be a folder that has several of these shared reports within it, and when you open this report it is going to pull the data for family email addresses for current enrolled members and members who were enrolled last year but have not re-enrolled yet for this year. It will pull all club members, clover buds, and volunteers within your hierarchy settings.If you choose to broadcast messages through your MSU Outlook, you can use this report to collect those family email addresses, which you may then copy from the Excel spreadsheet and paste into the BCC field in an Outlook email. Do note that Outlook generally prohibits sending to more than 500 email addresses at one time. That may be a limiting factor for you.So back to broadcast. I'm going to search through the member section, and I would like to send the monthly county newsletter to all club members. So I need to select Cloverbud and club members. Cloverbuds are our youngest members and they are a separate category from club member.If you are a county that has all of your volunteers enroll through 4-H Online, you could also select volunteers to receive this broadcast county newsletter. Because that is not a requirement for all counties, do remember that whatever you broadcast to your families and members should also then be broadcast to your volunteers from the volunteer central system.I would also like to send it to approved for this year and those who are not enrolled but were active last year.And then currently in my training county I have 105 members, but with these filters I only have 16. Those are the 16 members I would like to broadcast this message to. You can also do the same sort of search using flags or other criteria.When you have the list that you would like to use, click the broadcast button.This title field is for your purposes. So I'm going to put monthly county 4-H newsletter. These do not need to be different, but maybe here I will write the county name, and I would recommend putting in the actual name of the month. So if families need to go search for the April newsletter, April will be an easy keyword search in the subject line.You need to select your recipients. You can send to families and this will go to generally speaking the email address that families use to log into their accounts. If you select send to members, if teenagers or other age groups have their own email address entered along with their family account, it will also send messages to those folks. So if you feel that you want your teenage members to also get a copy of this report or this broadcast email, you can include send to members. If there are not members email addresses within the profiles, it will default back to the families, so there's not really a harm in sending to members. But realize that a lot of students include their school email address as their member email, and school servers will often block emails from non-school entities.In the configuration section you can send to all families, send to emergency contacts, and you can select as many of these as you feel are appropriate.Send to guardians. Unfortunately this feature has not been developed in 4-H Online and I don't know that it's going to be developed anytime soon. There is no place in a family or member profile where we collect guardian email addresses, so there's simply no data to send anything to with that setting.You can send to unsubscribed if a family is unsubscribed from our newsletters or our emails. You can override that, but I would use that very, very carefully and only for the most important messages. Perhaps the monthly newsletter doesn't meet that criteria.I do recommend always using your email address as the reply-to. So if a family receives a newsletter and they have a question about a program, when they click reply it will come to you versus an unmanned inbox somewhere.Text message notifications. This used to be a helpful feature, but it has recently been announced by the developers at 4-H Online that sending text messages has become increasingly more expensive, and text messaging services have really started filtering out messages that get sent in bulk. So if you send a broadcast out to 200 families and 200 text messages go out, we really quickly start to look like spam, and then the 4-H Online texting service starts to get blocked by those providers. So I wouldn't put much hope in this being effective at this point.Then click create. Here are some of your details. If you notice that you misspelled something or you change what you want to say, you can utilize the edit button.This box shows us the content of our message, so you're going to click edit, and here is where we get to put our text. I do recommend creating your message in Word or in Outlook so that you can use the editing tools within those programs. I like to do mine in an Outlook email message so then I get my signature and our civil rights statements that go at the bottom of our emails. Those are not automatically included in a broadcast message, so you will need to pull those email ending pieces into this document.You can use the fields on the side to bring in person-specific information. So if you'd like to say hello to a family, you can pull in the family name field and it will pull in the family's last name that goes with the email address. Remember that there is no space at the end of family names, so you need to put a space and then you can write your greeting.You can use multiple fields from the variable section to communicate with families, including club names and other details. The awards unit and club are used interchangeably in 4-H Online.You can change the font, font size, and use standard formatting like bold, italics, and underline. You can change text color, but use caution with colors like yellow, which are difficult to read. You can also add background color, headings, quotes, hyperlinks, images, and other elements.If you are sending a monthly newsletter that is published on your county website, you can insert a hyperlink to that document. Images can be inserted but often come in large, so you should resize them. Most recipients will be reading emails on a mobile device, so smaller images display better and give you more control over layout.You can also add video clips, but it is generally better to upload videos to MSU Media Space and link to them. Embedded videos may be flagged as spam by email providers.Once you have the body of your message the way you would like it, you can click save.You can also add attachments. If you would like to send your newsletter as a file, I recommend saving it as a PDF. PowerPoint and Publisher file types are not supported. You can also upload images in this section.You can review the email addresses that will receive your message. In families that have multiple club members or volunteers, all messages will be condensed into one email sent to the family account so they are not receiving multiple copies.I recommend using the send to self feature to preview the email. Notice that even when you maximize your Outlook screen, the message box does not change size, so keeping your images small helps them display properly.Attachments appear as links at the bottom of the message, so be sure to tell families to look for them there. Also remember to include your email signature, contact information, and civil rights statements, as these are not automatically included.If everything looks good, you can click send. If not, you can go back and edit.The formatting behind these messages can sometimes add extra spacing between paragraphs. If needed, adjust spacing using soft returns (Shift + Enter) instead of hard returns (Enter).After sending, you will see a results box. Sending time depends on the number of recipients. Smaller groups may process in minutes, while larger groups can take hours.Once your message is sent, you can go back to the broadcast section, open the email, and review details. This can be useful for reporting how many people received the message and how many opened it.You will see counts for sent, delivered, opened, and failed messages. Keep in mind that open rates are not always fully accurate because not all email providers report this information.Failed emails are addresses that do not exist or could not be delivered.You can also download a recipient report that includes tabs for delivered, failed, and unsubscribed users. This report becomes more accurate if you wait a few days after sending.You may also notice some users listed as unsubscribed, including staff. Currently, there is no way to undo some past unsubscribe actions.If a family says they are not receiving emails, you can open their profile and review their email history to see message status. This is helpful for troubleshooting and confirming delivery.Finally, if you start a message and do not finish it, drafts are saved and can be accessed later. Just be sure to review your recipient list again before sending, especially if it was based on a previous search.If you have any further questions on sending broadcast messages, please reach out to the 4-H Online Data Systems Coordinator.