Email notifications to keep your nonprofit’s community informed

We are excited to be bringing our clients automated email notifications for donor and beneficiary updates. This feature was highly requested by prospects, partners, and internally, which is why we prioritized its completion. If you have any other feedback on ways to improve the product, by all means, let us know!
To get started with this feature, you are going to need to turn the functionality on. The reason why we defaulted this feature to “off” is because many organizations that are migrating onto our platform need to move a lot of historical information onto the platform prior to “going live”. If the feature was defaulted to “on”, it would mean a lot of emails being sent to your users. Instead, we recommend turning it on when you are ready to use Clarity moving forward with new updates.
With email notifications, any and all updates related to a donor's history of giving can be automated. If you provide direct emails to your sponsors when an update has been provided by the sponsor student, this feature can be used to ensure that your sponsors are up to date with your child sponsorship program. Beyond that, if you are using Clarity to keep donors informed on a project your organization is facilitating as a charitable activity, updates can be sent to your entire project audience, automatically, all from one admin or user post. One-to-many associations are done easier, with personalization, all in one place!

Start using email notifications

To turn this feature on, and keep your donors up to date with their history of giving, you will need to navigate to “Settings” > “General”.



It is worth noting that donors and beneficiaries will always have full control over their subscribed status. Donors and beneficiaries are always able to adjust their own settings from their user profile that is accessible to them. This can be seen on the profile settings, under the avatar they chose to use for their identity image within Clarity.



If a user is subscribed to the emails, and the organization has notifications turned on, you are now live with email notifications, and can use this to automatically keep donors updated on their history of giving, or keep beneficiaries updated on their donor correspondence.
If your organization is using Approvals to moderate the content that is sent within your community, the post will need to be approved by the admin prior to the notification going out. This allows the admin to make sure that donors or beneficiaries are not updated with a post notification that actually doesn’t exist on their profile yet.
There is also a buffer period from the time the post is created (and approved if using approvals). The reason why we provided a buffer period from the time of approval to the time the email is sent is because people make mistakes. We want to make sure that the person uploading the content has time to make mistakes, and fix them, prior to the users being notified of the update.

Email updates received by your donors and beneficiaries

Now that you have your email notification settings turned on, it is time to create some posts!
When a post is created, the information from that post will be placed into an email template. This includes your custom fields (and their settings), partial descriptions, title, and a subset of the images or documents that are part of the post. These posts create the history of giving for your child sponsorship updates or your project’s progress.
It is important to note that the email does not include all information from the post. This was intentionally designed to improve the deliverability of these email notifications.
Email services can be tricky. Attachments that are too large, too many attachments, etc., can disrupt the ability of an email getting to its recipient. Due to this, we have included some of the information in the email (as described above) and the recipient can click a link from that email which will take them to the login for their profile. Once they log in, they will be able to see all of the information in that post, and the entire history of giving. This keeps your donors and beneficiaries informed, and the actions of your nonprofit organization transparent.
An example of an email template with a new post created is shown below:



Our goal with this feature is to increase transparency within your organization’s community, and provide efficient tools for nonprofits to keep their donors, and beneficiaries, informed.
If you’d like to learn more about email notifications, or have any suggestions for improvements, please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected]!