Email Templates - Admin¶

What an Admin should know:¶

In order to use the email templates, you must add the following Setting to your database if it is not already there, and change the setting to true. If you want to disable templates, you can set that to false.

Setting ID: UseEmailTemplates

Setting: true

Once that is done you are ready to modify the existing templates to include things like your church name, address, phone number, website URL, and perhaps a logo. The templates are modified or created *only* by the system Admin although they are designed to be used by everyone (unless you assign a specific role to the template - see below). We are giving you a couple of templates just to get your started, but we expect you (or your web guru) to create the specific templates that your church needs.

NOTE: You can create the user role Design and give that role to a designer in order for that person to create/manage Templates without having the role Admin.

The existing templates are:

Empty Template¶

This works just like the existing emails. You may choose to modify this one by inserting a footer with your church’s basic information, including an Unsubscribe link. That will insure that every email that is sent by your users contains that information.

Basic Template¶

Below is an sample of what could be used as a starter for your church’s ‘basic’ template:

Notice that this has the reason the person is receiving the email, the unsubscribe code (we recommend including that in all emails to more than just a few people) and the track code in addition to the church information. Remember that the track code only works when there is an image.

Also, you see the Template is assigned a Name, but you could also assign a Title (Subject).

The default Role is Everyone. Obviously, for your church’s ‘basic’ template you certainly want everyone to be able to use it.

How do you get started editing and creating Templates?¶

Go to Special Content. Notice the tabs - HTML Content; Text Content; Email Templates; Saved Drafts

Select Email Templates. This is where you can choose to either edit an existing Template or to create a New Email Template.

Notice that the BVCMS Template has the role Admin associated with it. That means that only an Admin will be able to use that Template. Templates that are available for everyone to use (but not to edit - that’s reserved for an admin) will not display a message.

What do I need to know about creating email templates?¶

You need to know HTML and CSS Styles. It is beyond the scope of our job to teach you how to do this but there are tons of free materials online. Plus you can examine our templates to get some idea of how it is done.

Actually Email Templates can be harder than a basic web page because you have to consider how your recipients are going to be viewing the newsletter. Many will be using Outlook which is not a browser, but it does do a fairly good job of displaying a Web page type of Email if you stick to the basics and use tables to lay things out. You can’t reference external style sheets either.

Basically the magic for BVCMS and email templates is a div tag with the bvedit attribute. That allows the div to be editable when sending an email using one of our templates.

Email Templates and Roles¶

Existing Roles¶

You can use existing roles and assign those to certain templates. Example: only someone with Finance role can use the template you create that has a footer with links to your online giving page, so you assign the role Finance to that template. Or you want a template for Membership, for that person to use. You can also have templates that are open to most of your staff, but not lay leaders, so you could limit the template to those with Edit role.

Create New Roles¶

You can create roles to use for Templates if you need to restrict the template more by the ministry rather than the standard user roles. Here’s how to do that:

Go to Manage Users

Enter the name of the role, and click Create New Role. NOTE: Roles that you create that are not the ‘standard’ roles are only used in cases like this, where you are assigning that role to a template or assigning a role to an organization to limit who can access it.

You can select that role when you are creating/editing the Template.
Then assign the appropriate users that role.

A possible use case would be this: You create a template for your Student Ministry containing their logo, links to their website, etc. In order for this template not to display for all users, create a role named Student Ministry and assign that role to the template. Then you can add that role to only those users in your Student Ministry who you want to be able to send emails using that special template.