Team Emails: Write, Schedule and Send
Admin only (and Managers, for their own team)
Engage › Emails lets you email your team from Give River: pick a ready-made template, adjust the words, choose who gets it, and send it now or schedule it. Give River fills in each member's own details — their name, drops to give, River Bank and rank — and shows you how many people opened it.
Emails come from "{your team} via Give River", and replies go to you (the admin who scheduled it).
Who can use it
- Admins and the Workspace Owner can use everything on this page. Other roles can be given the Team emails permission.
- Managers without that permission still see Emails if they have direct reports, limited to My team: their emails go only to the people who report to them, and the audience can't be changed. Managers can't save or delete templates or plan season emails. Managers can also start one from Team Hub → Roster → Email my team.
The Emails page
Go to Engage → Emails. The page has three tabs:
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Scheduled & drafts | Emails due in the next 30 days, plus undated drafts. A season's planned emails are grouped under the season. Each row shows the date, subject, how many members it reaches and its status (Draft, Scheduled, Sending) |
| Sent | Each sent email with its counts: delivered, opened (and the open rate), clicked, unsubscribed and bounced. Each week of a weekly email (such as Game Day) is listed under that email. Click one for its results |
| Templates | Your team's saved templates, Give River's starter templates, and Automatic emails. Click Use to start an email from a template, or the pencil to edit the template itself |
Use the ⋮ menu on a scheduled email or draft to Edit, Duplicate or Cancel scheduled.
Writing an email
Click New email, then pick a template or Blank email.
The editor opens: your settings on the left, a live preview on the right (on a phone, switch between Edit and Preview at the top). Use the phone / desktop toggle above the preview to see both sizes. The preview is the real email, filled in for you.
Subject and Preview text (the line most inboxes show after the subject). Tap a field chip under either one to insert a merge field such as First name or Team name.
Message: build the body from blocks. Click Add block to add a:
Block What it does Heading A large title Text A paragraph. Its toolbar adds bold, italic, a link, or a merge field (Insert field) Button A button with its text and link (https only) Image Upload an image or paste a link, plus a short description for screen readers Divider A thin line Live block Filled in for each member when the email is sent: Your River Bank, Your rank, This week's River Run, Season leaderboard top 5, Upcoming celebrations or Open survey Drag a block by its handle, or use the up and down arrows, to reorder it. The bin icon deletes it.
Who gets it: use the same audience picker as Announcements and Surveys — everyone, people, groups, locations, departments, roles or a saved segment. The count under it shows how many members it will reach; click See who for names. Members who turned off team emails, or whose address bounced, are left out of the count and the send.
When: Send now, or Schedule with a date and time at least 5 minutes ahead (up to about a year). Times are shown in your own time zone. Scheduled emails go out within the hour after the time you pick (for example, one set for 9:00 leaves around 9:17). The Game Day template can also Repeat weekly; a weekly email is always scheduled, never sent now.
Click Send me a test to get it in your own inbox, filled with your own data (one test a minute).
Click Save draft to keep working later, or Schedule / Send now. Give River asks you to confirm and names the number of recipients.
A scheduled email can be edited or cancelled until 5 minutes before it goes out: open it and click Cancel scheduled. A weekly email can be stopped at any time the same way. Each member gets at most 3 team emails a day from your team; extra ones are skipped for them. Emails that have been sent can't be changed — duplicate one to send it again.
Templates
Eight starter templates come with every team: Welcome, Season kickoff, It's Game Day (weekly), Mid-season boost, Final week, Season results, New survey and New required River Run. Click Save as template in the editor to keep an email as your own template; it then appears under Your templates.
To change a template itself, click its pencil icon (Admins). The editor opens for the template only — subject, preview text and message, with Send me a test and Save; there is no audience or send time. Saving a starter makes your team's own copy, so later improvements to the starter don't overwrite your words; Reset to default removes your copy and brings Give River's version back. You can delete your own templates (the bin icon); starters can't be deleted.
Automatic emails
Give River sends two emails on its own, and you can change their wording under Templates → Automatic emails:
| When Give River sends it | Extra fields you can insert | |
|---|---|---|
| Drops received | When someone receives drops | The giver's name, the number of drops, the giver's message, and the link to view them. The The giver's message live block shows the note that came with the drops |
| Invitation | When someone is invited to your team | The inviter's name and the join link |
Click Edit to open one. Change the subject, preview text and message, send yourself a test (filled with example values), then Save — your team's version is used from then on. Reset to default goes back to Give River's version (it's greyed out while you're already using it). Automatic emails can't be scheduled or sent to an audience, and they don't appear when you start a new email: Give River decides when they go out.
Game Day
It's Game Day is a weekly scoreboard email: each member's River Bank and rank, one River Run to play this week, and a button back into the app. For teams that send Game Day, it replaces the weekly recap, so members get one weekly email, not two.
Season emails
When you create a season, the wizard's Communications step proposes its emails — kickoff on day 1, a mid-season boost, a final-week push and a results roundup — dated from the season's own dates. Switch off any you don't want, change a date, and choose Schedule all or Keep as drafts. Drafts wait on the Scheduled & drafts tab until you schedule them; nothing is sent without that choice. For an existing season, click Plan emails in its row of Engage → Seasons. See Season Creation and Management.
If a season's dates change, its unsent planned emails move with them. If the season is cancelled, they are cancelled too.
Results
On the Sent tab, click an email to see:
- Delivered, opened (with the open rate), clicked, unsubscribed and bounced counts.
- Didn't open: the members who got it but haven't opened it. Give River doesn't show when each person opened it.
- Resend to these: makes a draft copy addressed only to the people who didn't open it, and opens it in the editor so you can adjust and send it.
Open in my email
To send an email from your own mail app instead, click Open in my email in the editor. Copy the subject and text, paste your recipients (they are split into groups of 50, because mail apps limit long address lists), and click Open in mail app for each group. These emails come from you, so Give River doesn't track them or add an unsubscribe link.
What members see
- The email arrives from "{your team} via Give River", with your team's logo and colors, and replies go to the admin who sent it.
- The footer shows your team name, "sent via Give River", Give River's postal address and an Unsubscribe link.
- Unsubscribe works in one click, without signing in. It turns off team emails from that team only (with an undo button). Sign-in codes, invitations and required-training notices still arrive.
- Members can turn team emails back on, or off, in Settings → Email Preferences → Team emails from your admins (see Email Notification Preferences).
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