Send your first broadcast email

You need to send an email to a group of members or contacts. This walks through the canonical broadcast flow: picking who, writing the message, previewing, sending or scheduling, and reading what happened after. Each step links DOWN to the reference doc with the details when you need them.

The example assumes a one-off campaign (not an automation). For triggered sequences and drip flows, see email automations instead.

Pick who you are sending to

Open Email in your workspace sidebar and click New campaign. The composer opens with the Audience step first.

The audience model has two layers:

• Segments are saved rules ("active members in Pennsylvania", "donors who gave in the last 90 days"). You build segments once in the CRM and reuse them.
• Per-campaign audience is the specific filter for this one send. You can pick a saved segment, build one inline, or upload a CSV.

For the segment builder and the per-campaign overrides, see audiences. For how segments are constructed, see contact segments.

One thing the composer does for you: it shows the recipient count after applying every active filter, including suppression. If a contact unsubscribed, bounced, or complained, they are subtracted from the count automatically. See email suppression for what gets suppressed and why.

Draft the email

Click Next to move to the composer.

You have three starting points:

1. Blank to write from scratch
2. Template to start from a saved design (see email templates)
3. Previous campaign to copy and modify a send you ran before

Fill in:

• Subject line. The most important line in the email. Aim for under 50 characters; longer lines truncate in inboxes.
• Preheader. The short snippet inboxes show after the subject. Use it; do not leave the default "View in browser".
• Body. The visual editor handles layout. For dynamic content (a contact's first name, organization, custom fields), use merge tags; see merge tags.
• From name and address. Defaults to your workspace's verified sending identity. Match the from name to who members expect to hear from.

If your org has multiple verified sending domains, pick the one that best matches the topic (action alerts from action@, newsletters from news@, etc.).

Preview, test, and send

Click Preview to see exactly what a recipient sees, including merge-tag substitution for a specific contact. Toggle between mobile and desktop views; most members read on phones.

Click Send test to email yourself a real copy. The test renders in your actual email client with real merge tags, which is the only reliable way to catch broken images, dead links, and merge tags that fall through to a default. A bare "Hi {{first_name}}," that ships as "Hi ," to half the list is the most common avoidable miss; fix the source data or pick a different tag before sending.

When the test looks right, choose the send time:

• Send now queues the campaign immediately. Delivery starts within a minute.
• Schedule lets you pick a future date and time. See scheduling campaigns for the picker, timezone behavior, and how to cancel a scheduled send before it fires.

The platform sends in batches to maintain deliverability; the campaign moves from "Queued" to "Sending" to "Sent" over a few minutes. You can leave the page; sending continues in the background.

After it goes out

Within a few hours, open the campaign and click Analytics.

You will see:

• Delivery. How many were accepted by the recipient's mail server vs. bounced. A bounce rate above 2% is a deliverability warning; investigate before your next send.
• Engagement. Opens and clicks, with a per-link breakdown. Compare against your org's prior sends, not against industry benchmarks; benchmarks vary too much by audience.
• Conversions. RSVPs, donations, or signups attributed back to this send (when your campaign links to OrganizeOS pages that can attribute).

See campaign analytics for the deeper breakdown.

If a bounce rate spikes, check the suppression list and clean obvious dead addresses before sending again. Repeated sends to the same bad addresses hurt deliverability for the whole org.

Why this matters

Email is still the workhorse channel for getting people to actually show up, give, and act. Most of the variance in whether a campaign works lives in three places: who you sent it to (audience), what the first sentence is (subject line), and whether the message arrived at all (deliverability). The flow above is short on purpose: it walks the parts that matter for an honest send and links out for the depth. The fastest way to get better at email is to send one, read the analytics, and ship a tighter version next time.