You can use Crowdicity to send emails to your community, to keep them up to date with the activity in the community, new challenges that they might be interested in or anything else that you'd like to talk to them about.

You can send an email to all of your users or just a selection of them.

Emails from your community will be created using an html template, this is the way that most email newsletters are created, so they will automatically include an email banner and signature. You can edit these elements by changing the email template, check out our guide to Customising the email template for more information.

When you have sent your email, you're able to see statistics related to how many users received it, opened it and clicked on any links that you added to it.

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To send an email to users, you need to create a new email 'campaign'. It's called an email campaign because the email system in Crowdicity is similar to other mailing software (eg Mailchimp)in that it lets you name email campaigns so that you can find and edit them for future use. You can also use the email statistics to see how well your 'campaign' performed.

Creating an email campaign

1. Go to Email using the Crowd Management menu, it will open on the first tab, Saved drafts.

2. Click the Create new campaign button, which will open the email wizard.

3. Give your email campaign a name that you will recognise (eg March newsletter), and add a Subject for your email (eg "Another great month in the community!")

4. Add a From name, when users receive the email, this is the name that it will look like it came from. As an example, you could use your own name or the name of the community.

5. Add a Reply email address, this is the address that emails will be sent to if a user replies to the email. Click Next to continue.

1. If you'd like the email to have your usual template, select Community branded in the Email style drop down field, otherwise change it to Plain.

2. Add the text of your email and click Next to choose the recipients of the email.

1. You can send the email to a system group (admins or users), one of your custom/dynamic groups, all users who are participating in a particular challenge or to a specific user.

2. If your community is set up in more than one language, you can choose to send your email only to people who have selected a specific language. This allows you to customise the content of the email according to the language of users.

1. When you click Next you will be shown a summary of the details of your campaign, you can also view a preview of the email, so that you can see what it will look like when users receive it.

2. If you are happy with the details of your email, tick the confirmation box. The button in the window will change to FINISH AND SEND. Click the button to send your email.

If you'd like to save the email as a draft, simply click the button SAVE AS DRAFT button to come back to it later.

When you have sent an email, you can return to it later to edit it and resend it. This can be useful if you are regularly sending emails with a similar format, or if you need to send a similar email to different groups of users.

To edit and resend an email campaign:

1. Go to Email using the Crowd Management menu, click on the Sent tab.

2. Find the email that you'd like to edit, and click on the drop down field next to it.

3. Select Edit and resend and follow the steps above to make any changes that you'd like to the email before re-sending it.