Sending an Email through your platform
Once you have enabled your foundU platform to send emails, you'll have the ability to send ad hoc or templated email messages through the platform with the click of a button. These can be used to:
- Communicate with your applicants throughout the onboarding process.
- Notify your employees of shift offers and job offers.
- Communicate with employees and be able to see a record of the comms you have sent them.
- Let your workforce know that payroll is complete.
- Send a bulk email with a video link to your workforce.
- And much more!
In this article, we will cover:
- Updating your email settings
- Sending emails
- Email reporting
To see a list of prebuilt communication templates and notifications that are triggered at different times, see our helpful guide here.
Configuring Email
To be able to send emails from your platform, you'll first need to enable emails in your platform.
The email settings within your Platform Settings are like the 'wizard behind the curtain' for sending emails from your platform, so it is important to ensure that you set up these general settings first.
To configure your Email Settings:- Navigate to the main menu and select Platform Settings > Communication Settings.
- You'll see your Email Settings, these are:
- Enable system emails - This toggle sets all email communications in the platform on or off.
- Accounts and payroll email address - This email is used as a reply to the email address for accounts and payroll emails.
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Administration email address - This email is used as a reply to email for platform administration emails.
Hot tip: Should you disable emails in your platform after adding valid email credentials, when turned back on at a later date the original credentials will automatically re-populate.
- You'll also see your Email Testing settings, these are:
- Redirect all emails for testing - Sometimes when you're testing emails you prefer to redirect emails while completing your test. Selecting 'Yes' will redirect emails to the email testing address. Ensure to switch back to 'No' after your test is completed.
- Send a test email - This allows you to enter an email and select send to confirm the email is sent.
- Configure your 'Email Settings' or 'Email Testing' settings as needed. A floating bar will appear on the button with the number of changes you've made.
- Review your changes and select Save.
- You're now ready to send emails from your platform.
Hot tip: If your email settings are turned off, you can also check your email status from your Dashboard > Insights. Additionally, you will see the warning below on your platform.
Communicating with Email
Custom templates will allow you to streamline your communication with your employees, whether by SMS or email, using templates will save you time.
Next time you send an email or SMS to an employee/s, consider building it as a template and storing it to use again in the future!
For more detailed instructions on creating email or SMS templates, please read our Creating Templates for email or SMS article.
Please follow along to see an email template in action. In this example, we send a bulk email to 2 recently terminated employees using a premade template. We have also included the Exit Interview attachment.
You are able to tailor the size of your email group if needed and can send an email to:
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- An individual employee
- A select group of employees by using your filters or tag groups
- All employees
You can include sending any attachments in any of your emails as well. (e.g. png or pdf).
To send an email individually to employees:
- Navigate to People > Approved People and select the relevant employee to go to their profile.
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From the overview page, you have 3 options to select:
- Employee's email address - This will open in your external mailing system.
- Send Icon - This will open the modal to send an email from your platform.
- Copy Icon - This will copy the employee's email address.
- When sending an email from your platform, add the content of your email or select a template. Please see below for further details.
- Select Send email to xx employee.
To send an email to an employee or multiple employees:
- In the quick menu, navigate to People > Approved People (or Pending People for candidates who are Onboarding).
- Next, select your group.
- For an individual employee - Search for the relevant employee names.
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For a group of employees - Select 'Show Filter', filter your employee list and/or select people from the checkbox next to their name.
In the below example, we have selected to filter to our full-time employees only. By increasing the page size to a maximum of 1000 we ensure that all of our employees will appear on one page.
- After you have filtered/selected the relevant employees, select Bulk Actions > Send Email to Selected.
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Create your email content. Create your content by:
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Using the free text section to add your email content, or
- Applying an email template that you have previously created.
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You can also use tokens (such as name tokens) when sending an email to multiple employees. This allows you to write one message that will be unique to each recipient. For example, if you use the First name token, every employee receives an email with their First name in it.
- Select the + against the relevant token to apply it to your content section.
- Select the 'Email "reply to" address'. You can choose one of the following:
- You - Your email address that is linked to your foundU account.
- Account email - This is used as a reply to the email address for accounts and payroll emails
- Admin email - This is used as a reply to email for platform administration emails.
- Other admin - This is used for choosing a specific Admin user.
Hot tip: All available email addresses will appear in the 'Email "reply to" address' field, however, a badge will tell you whether the email address is an Account, Admin or Other admin email.
- Add any attachments (jpg, png. and pdf up to a maximum of 5MB).
- Select send once you're ready to send your email.
Below you can see the use of the first name, last name, employee manager tokens, and the attachments added. You can also see that the email will be sent to 187 employees based on your filtered group.
If you'd like to see what that email looks like for your employees and who has received it, navigate to the Employee Profile > Comms and View.
Here is the content we drafted above.
There will be times when you need to email to all employees who are working today with an urgent message! This action can be performed from your Dashboard via the 'People working today' card.
Similar to any features from the Dashboard, your permissions and search restrictions are respected here, so you can be assured that you will only communicate with employees you have access to!
This feature will be handy to send a quick email to:
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- All employees working today.
- A filtered group of employees (by roster or operation) who have a shift today.
Common use cases for this feature might be:
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- Sending a quick email to all employees working on a roster to remind them that there is a new safety policy that must be reviewed this week!
- An email reminder at the end of a shift to remember to upload a qualification from a training course today!
- An email to all 'available' employees asking who can start 1 hour earlier today.
If you'd like to use this feature to email your employees working today, please refer to our detailed section on Communicating from your Dashboard.
There may be times when there is a simpler method that can be used to communicate with employees.
An example of this is reminding new candidates that they need to complete their onboarding process.
A way you can do this is:
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- Use the inbuilt send reminder function on the Employee Profile.
- Send a bulk registration email to pending candidates via Pending People > Bulk Actions.
You can send an email reminder to an applicant from their Employee Profile, as seen below.
You can send a registration email to pending candidates in bulk via Pending People > Bulk Actions.
Email Reporting
There are two places where you can review the emails sent from your platform.
These areas are:
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- The Employee Profile
- The Communication Log
For more information on viewing your sent email communications, please refer to our helpful guide here!