Communication Plans

Communication Plans are sequences of email, letter, and to-do templates that help you consistently interact with the various people with whom your school communicates. Here's how they work:

1. You create a new communication plan, filling it with email, letter, and to-do templates.
2. The plan is applied to people in various ways—you can add it to them individually or add the plan to a group of people.
3. The person who adds the plan to a person is usually the Sender; you can also designate someone else as the sender.
4. The person to whom the plan is added is the Recipient.
5. The sequence of communications you set up is initiated as of the day you add the plan. As these events occur, the activity feed keeps a complete record of them. You can also view and change scheduled plan events in the Scheduled Events report.

Creating a plan

1. Click Add Communication Plan.
2. Give the plan a name. This is for your own internal use—recipients will never see this.
3. Start adding events. For each event you'll need to select...
   • Day/Date: You can schedule events based on how many days have passed since you added the plan to a person OR by specifying a particular date.
   • For example, when scheduling a Day event: If you enter 5, when a plan is added on 3/15, the event will be scheduled for 3/20. You can also specify a specific time for emails to be sent.
   • When scheduling a Date event: Enter a MM/DD date. If the plan is added after that date, choose how to handle past date events—Skip the event, Schedule (or send) it immediately upon adding the plan, or schedule/send it the following calendar year.
   • Choose whether the event affects the sender or the recipient. You can also assign the event to Someone else—this event will always affect the person you select.
   • Choose whether an email or letter is sent to the person you just chose, or if a to-do will be assigned.
   • Finally, choose which template—email, letter, or to-do—you wish to use for this event.
4. Click add an event to continue building the plan. Click to delete an event.
5. Click Save to finish updating the plan.

Now that you've created the plan, you can start applying it to people (see below).

• Emails are sent at the time of day you specify in the event.
• Printed letters are sent to the print queue on 12 AM of the day the event occurs.
• To-dos are due on the day the event occurs.

Editing a plan

You can edit a plan at any time. Any changes you make will not affect anyone currently on that plan—they'll only affect those to whom you add the plan in the future.

1. Click the plan name in the Communication Plan list to go to the design page.
2. Click Edit Communication Plan.
3. Make your changes and save them.

Applying communication plans

There are several ways to apply communication plans. When applying a plan, you can designate yourself or someone else as the sender.

• On a person's Profile > Activity Feed, click apply communication plan.
• Use the data slicer to add the plan to a group of students.
• You can add (and remove) plans to the people shown on various reports—Contacts > People, Admissions > Leads, Donations > Donors, and other places.

When adding a plan:

1. Select the plan you wish to add from the drop-down.
2. Select the person to whom you wish to assign the plan. This person will be the sender in the plan.
3. If you wish, change the start date.
4. When you're done, click Save.

Scheduled Events

The Scheduled Events report gathers together all the emails, letters, and to-dos scheduled for a particular timeframe. Use the filter to focus the report on certain kinds of events. You can find events for specific senders or recipients, or show only overdue to-dos for a certain plan, or find all the events that contain the word "donation"—among many other things.

Click Actions to perform these tasks:

• Email... Email the senders, recipients, or the people attached to the events shown in the report.
• Change due date: This lets you change the scheduled date/time for all of the events in your report ( see above).
• Delete events: Removes the events in your report from all the actors involved. This does not affect the communication plans in which these events are included.
• Remove communication plans: Removes the communication plans and all associated events from all the actors in your report.
• Export: Create an XLS or CSV of the report.