Announcements & Email Templates

Send announcements, newsletters and updates to your congregation, and reuse designs as templates.

Composing an email

Choose your audience — everyone, a tag, a group, a ministry, or one specific member — then write your subject and body using the composer.

The composer has three modes, switchable at any time (they all convert to the same content underneath, so switching doesn’t lose your work):

• Blocks (the default) — build your email visually from blocks: headings, paragraphs, images, buttons, lists, dividers, and multi-column layouts. Drag blocks to reorder them, duplicate or delete them, and click + Add block to insert a new one.
• HTML — write raw HTML directly, for advanced users.
• Markdown — a simple, readable text shortcut for a quick plain email.

A live preview on the side shows exactly what recipients will see, including any merge variables filled in with sample data.

Columns

Use a Columns block to put more than one thing side-by-side in a row — for example, an image next to a paragraph, or two buttons next to each other. Pick a width split (50/50, 33/33/33, etc.), then choose what each column holds. On a narrow phone screen, columns stack on top of each other automatically so the layout still reads well.

Personalizing with merge variables

Click into any text field in the composer (a heading, a paragraph, a button label…), then click a variable from the toolbar (like First name) to insert it at your cursor as {{first_name}}. It’s replaced with each recipient’s actual value when the email sends — the preview shows this using a sample recipient so you can check it looks right before sending.

Sending a test first

Use Send test to my email to receive the exact email you’ve composed at your own address before sending it to your real audience — a good habit before any real send.

Sending as an app notification

Send as has three boxes you can combine: Email, App notification and Webhooks. An app notification is a short message: the Subject is its title and Notification text (up to 200 characters) is the message; merge variables work in both. It reaches people whose member record is linked to a HolyCRM login: they see it in the app’s bell, and on their phone if they turned notifications on. People without a login only get the email. Send test notification to me shows you how it looks first.

Sending to your webhooks

If an Administrator has turned on webhooks that receive announcements, tick Webhooks under Send as (alone or with email and app notification); otherwise the box is greyed out. The announcement — subject, message and the list of people it’s for, with their names, emails and phones — goes to your own automation (for example a Zapier, Make or n8n flow), which can pass it on through WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or anything else. Sending to the webhook doesn’t count toward the monthly email limit. Recent sends shows whether the webhook received it.

Email Templates

Save a design you’ll reuse — a welcome email, a monthly newsletter layout — as a Template, then load it into a new announcement later instead of rebuilding it from scratch. Templates show merge variables as literal {{placeholders}} in the preview, since there’s no specific recipient yet. Duplicate makes a copy of a template to start a new one from it.

Images, under the templates list, shows every image you’ve uploaded into emails and templates. You can delete the ones you don’t need; an image you delete also disappears from emails already sent.

Branding

• Your church’s logo, if you’ve uploaded one in Church Settings, can be inserted into any email with one click via the composer’s Church logo button.
• Your church’s colour (the theme colour in Church Settings) shows as a thin bar on top of every email, and in the preview.
• Every email sent through HolyCRM includes a small “Sent with HolyCRM” line — this isn’t something you can remove, and it’s kept deliberately understated.

After you send

Emails go out in the background, usually within a few minutes, so you can leave the screen right away. Recent sends shows the progress of each send: how many have been delivered out of the total, and Sending… while some are still on their way. If an email can’t be delivered (for example, the address doesn’t exist), it’s counted as Failed and the reason is shown under that send; the others still go out. A test email arrives the same way, usually within a minute.

Opened. If an Administrator turned on Count who opens Announcements emails in Church Settings, Recent sends also shows how many emails were opened. It’s an approximate number: some email apps open every image automatically, others never do.

Bounced. When an address turns out not to exist, or someone marks your email as spam, the send shows it as Bounced. An address that bounced is skipped in later sends until the person’s email is changed in Members; someone who marked it as spam is unsubscribed. (This works for emails sent by HolyCRM; if your church sends through its own email account, its bounces go to that account.)

Unsubscribing

Every email ends with a short note saying why the person gets it, your church’s address (the one in your website settings, if you filled it in) and an Unsubscribe link. Email services such as Gmail also show their own “Unsubscribe” button. You can’t remove the link: it’s what keeps your emails out of spam folders, and in many countries the law requires it.

When someone unsubscribes, their member record shows Unsubscribed from announcement emails and later emails skip them. They’re counted as Unsubscribed in the result and in Recent sends, and they don’t count toward your monthly limit. They still get app notifications and emails they ask for themselves, such as service confirmations. If they want the emails again, they can use the same link, or you can untick the box on their record when they ask you to.

Limits

A single send is capped at 500 recipients. This keeps sending reliable; if your audience is bigger than that, ask about splitting the send.

Monthly email limit. Each church can send up to 1,000 emails per month (every recipient counts as one email, test emails included). The screen shows how many you’ve used and when the count resets, on the 1st of each month. A send that would go over the limit isn’t sent at all, so nobody gets half a message. App notifications don’t count toward this limit, so for short announcements they’re a good alternative.

To send without this limit, an Administrator can connect your church’s own email account under Integrations.

Need more emails? An Administrator can buy an email pack in Billing: 5,000 emails for US$5. Pack emails are used only after the month’s 1,000 run out, and they never expire. The screen shows how many you have left.

Roadmap

Scheduling a send for later (sends go out immediately), SMS as a channel, click tracking, and nested columns-within-columns.