Most emails you send from Cameo are either mailshots or part of the membership life-cycle workflow (such as a renewal reminder). Sometimes, though, you want to email someone, as you would through an ordinary email app: use one-off message for these. Sometimes you find similar emails going to multiple people over time: use canned message templates for these.

Ad hoc one-off emails

You can, of course, send your email from an ordinary email app. This is not ideal, though, because:

  • the email is not associated with the membership record, for completeness. You can BCC the email to Cameo’s incoming email for attachments (attach@to.cameo.example.com). This is easiest when you are replying to an email they sent to you, as the email from them gets included in the outgoing message, and Cameo can determine from that who it should be attached to. Otherwise, you must identify the membership in the subject line or to address (e.g. attach+1234@to.cameo.example.com)
  • an ad-hoc email not copied to Cameo must be provided as part of a GDPR subject access request. If it is copied to Cameo, that’s done automatically. Otherwise, you must trawl your separate email account for relevant messages manually.

You can send an ad-hoc email direct from Cameo, like this:

  • Locate the membership record concerned
  • Go to member tasks → send canned message
  • If you don’t already have a template set up, click the button to create a new email template
  • Click the one-off message button. That merges the selected membership with the template. The template is very simple: just the header fields and top-and-tailed content.
  • That also takes you to communications → pending emails where you should edit the content of the message.
  • Then send it. Because it was prepared using a specific membership, it is automatically attached to their past communications, which you can see in both communications → sent email and member info → past communications.

Canned messages (stock emails)

Sometimes, you need to send an email to someone similar to an email you sent someone else previously. For example, you get an email from GoCardless saying someone cancelled their direct debit, so you need to enquire of the member what their intention was (to resign their membership, or did changing bank account fail, or whatever).

You can prepare a template which makes the relevant enquiry (its audience should be individually chosen. Then each time you need it, in member tasks → send canned message, select the template and click prepare message. You can further customise the message in communications → pending emails before sending it.

This is very similar to sending a one-off message, except that you get to choose the template rather than retyping a common message.

You can also use this if you want several one-off message templates that come from different people or roles.