Sending an email campaign

Email is how most organizations reach their supporters at scale. The email campaign builder is a desktop tool in your workspace.

Building a campaign

Open Outreach in the workspace sidebar, choose Campaigns under Email, and create a new campaign. The composer walks through four steps: Setup (subject and sender), Audience (who receives it), Design (the email body), and Review (preview and send). Give the campaign a subject line and build the body using the block editor. You can start from a saved template to keep your branding consistent, or build from scratch. Keep the subject line short and specific; it is the single biggest driver of whether people open the email. You can personalize the subject and body with merge tags like the recipient's first name.

On the Setup step, From name is the name recipients see next to the address. Campaigns are sent from a shared OrganizeOS sending domain, and you can change only the part of the address before the @. Sending from your own domain isn't available yet. Reply-to sends replies to an address you choose.

On the Design step your email appears as a page on a dotted canvas, the way it will sit in a reader's inbox. Click anywhere outside a block to open the email-wide Styles: Page background colors the area around your email, and Email background colors the content itself. Switch between desktop and mobile widths, or between editing and a preview of the exact email that is sent, with the controls above the canvas.

Choosing who receives it

The Audience step targets your campaign with a saved segment from your CRM, an ad-hoc filter, or both, and shows a live count of who will actually receive the email after opt-outs are removed. Sending to the right audience matters more than sending to everyone: relevant email keeps your list healthy and your deliverability high. See Choosing an audience for your email for the full walkthrough.

Links and custom HTML

Link fields on Button, Image, and Avatar blocks accept web addresses starting with http:// or https://, plus mailto: and tel: links and merge tags. If you paste anything else, the field turns red and explains what is allowed, and the address is not saved to your design. A button with no address is not a dead link in the sent email: it goes out as plain text, keeping its wording. An image with no picture uploaded is left out entirely rather than sent as a broken image. The Review step lists any button with no address, image with no picture, and event, petition, or fundraiser block with nothing picked, with a shortcut back to the design.

The Custom HTML block accepts your own markup for anything the other blocks do not cover. Scripts, stylesheets, forms, and embedded frames are removed before the block is drawn, so style your markup with inline style attributes rather than a <style> block.

The Preview tab shows the email exactly as it will be sent, including the unsubscribe footer and any event, petition, or fundraiser blocks.

Saving your work

The steps sit in the header at the top of the composer, with Back and the button for the next step on the right. On the Review step that button sends, schedules, or saves and exits, depending on what you chose.

Select Save draft at any time. Your draft is also saved when you continue from Design to Review. If you select Campaigns to leave with unsaved changes, you are asked whether to save a draft, discard your changes, or stay. Your browser also asks before you close the tab or reload with unsaved changes.

Testing before you send

Always send yourself a test first. Check the subject line, the preview text, every link, and how it looks on a phone. Most supporters read email on mobile. Fix anything that looks off before sending to your full audience.

Duplicating a campaign

To reuse a campaign you already built, open Outreach, then Campaigns under Email, click the actions menu at the end of the campaign's row, and choose Duplicate. You get a brand-new draft that copies the design, content, sender, and audience, with "Copy of" added to the front of the name and subject line. The copy is only a draft: it has no send time and no results of its own, and duplicating never touches the original. The composer opens on the new draft so you can edit the subject and body before sending.

Sending, scheduling, and tracking results

In the Review step you can send immediately or schedule the campaign for a specific time. Scheduled times are always in your organization's time zone, and the picker is labeled with it, so everyone on your team picks the same moment. Send acts once: if the send has already started, a second click takes you to the campaign report instead of sending again. See Scheduling campaigns for how sends are batched, what the Failed status means, and what happens if you run short on quota. For recurring or trigger-based sends (welcome messages, post-donation thank-yous), build an email automation instead of a one-off campaign.

After a campaign sends, review its performance -- opens, clicks, bounces, and more -- on the campaign detail page; see Reading campaign analytics. Every send also updates each contact's record, so email engagement becomes part of the unified view you use for future targeting.

Why this matters

Consistent, targeted email is one of the highest-leverage actions an organizer takes. Sending to the right audience keeps your list engaged and your deliverability strong, so future campaigns actually land in inboxes. Opt-outs and bounces are honored automatically (see Email suppression), which protects your sender reputation and your supporters' trust. The engagement data from each send feeds back into contact records, compounding the value of every message you send over time.