Volunteer Communications: Segmented Blasts and Hours Summaries

The Communications tab under Volunteer Management lets you email a targeted segment of your volunteers, either as a general announcement or as a personalized hours summary.

Where to find it

Go to Volunteer Management → Communications. From there you can build a segment and choose one of two send modes: a general email blast, or an hours summary email.

Segmenting your recipients

The starting pool is every contact who has an active (non-cancelled) sign-up on one of your volunteer sign-up campaigns. You can narrow that pool with three filters:

• Volunteer page — limit to volunteers signed up on one specific volunteer page, or leave it on all pages.
• Interest/skill tag — limit to volunteers who have a matching interest or skill tag. The list of tags offered here is pulled from the tags actually present in your volunteer pool, so you'll only see tags that are in use.
• Application status — choose Everyone, Approved application only, or Missing approved application, checked against each volunteer's application record.

As you change any filter, a live recipient-count badge updates automatically so you can see how many people you're about to reach before sending.

Sending a general email blast

Compose your message using the rich text editor. You can use these merge fields in the subject or body:

If your organization has more than one verified sending address, you'll also see a From address selector. The blast is queued and sent in bulk, with each recipient's merge fields filled in individually. Each send is logged on the recipient's own contact timeline.

Sending an hours summary email

This mode is built for sending each volunteer a personalized summary of the hours they've contributed. In addition to the general merge fields above, you can use:

Click Load hours template to start from a pre-built template that already uses these fields, then edit it as needed.

Because hours are specific to each volunteer, this send works differently from the general blast under the hood: rather than one bulk send, each recipient's hours are calculated individually and merged in one at a time before their email goes out.

Sending behavior

Both send types ask you to confirm in a browser dialog before anything goes out, and show a toast message with the final recipient count once the send completes.