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Managing Sending Groups

Sending groups on Yodel are good for sending as an organization and sharing the workload with a team. There are several advantages to sending messages as a group.

1. You have the option of masking your personal name as the sender by using a business, company, or organizational name.

2. You can include a group logo or image that receivers can see.

3. You can assign the group a contact email address that differs from any of the group member's email addresses. This will still not be seen by your receiving audience.

4. You can share additional contact information that can be seen by your audience, such as a group phone number and website.

5. You can manage and assign group roles for the team.

Create a Group

Within your groups page, you have the option to create a new group. You'll have to enter a private group name that your team will see but your receiving audiences will not. You can provide a different display name that will be publicly visible to your audiences. Yodel has easy links available to match the private group name and the public display name, if you wish to, and it will indicate when they are a match.

You'll also need to add a group email address that will need to be verified in order for your group to be eligible to send messages. This email address can match one of your group members' personal emails, but it does not have to. Your selected email address will not be shown to your audience.

You can also optionally provide additional group information that can be seen by your audiences. This includes a group phone number with extension, a logo or other representative image, or a group website address.

Group Approval by Yodel

When you create a new group or edit an existing one, it will be in a "pending" status. Yodel reviews all potential senders (groups or individuals) to maintain quality, to ensure safety and security guidelines are met, and to abide by state and federal legal requirements.

Approvals are a manual process, and Yodel will process new senders as quickly as we can. You will be alerted, per your notification preferences, of a change in your group sending status.

Invite Members

On the "members" tab of the group's page, you have the option to invite members by email address or by user code.

Inviting by email is straightforward. Just enter their email address and Yodel will send them an invitation to join your group.

Inviting by user code is an option as well. The person you'd like to invite would have to already have a Yodel account and provide you with their user code which can be found on their account profile page.

Join a Group

You can share the group code with others. It can be found on the group page.

Any registered user can visit their manage groups page and request to join your group by entering the group code.

A notification will be sent to the group owner and admin based on their notification preferences. The group administrators have the option to review the request and accept or deny.

Alternatively, the web link to the group's page on Yodel can be shared with anyone, and if they are not already a member, they'll be able to request to join on the group's page also.

Member Roles

There are three levels of group member roles:

1. Owner

2. Admin

3. Member

There must always be one or more group owners. When the last owner chooses to leave the group, they must first assign a new owner or otherwise archive the entire group for all members. Owners are allowed all permissions for the group and any messages that have the group selected as the sender.

Admin members have almost all the same privileges as owners except they are not able to archive the group for all members. If an admin chooses to leave the group, nothing else has to change because the group will still have at least one owner and possibly other admins.

Those with a standard member role are limited on what they can and cannot do within the group. They can view general group details like display name, logo, and website, but they are not allowed to edit them. They can see current group members as well as those who have been invited or have requested to join, but they can not remove, archive, approve, or deny them. They are able to select the group as the sender of a message, edit group messages, and schedule messages for sending, but they cannot see final pricing or do the final approval to print and send the message. They are able to see sending details and analytics as well as responses to the messages.

Send Messages as a Group

Any group member can begin creating a message in the same way they would outside of the group. Their draft will not become visible to the other group members until they select the group as the sender. They can do this as either the group on its own, or as a combination of their personal name followed by the group's display name in parentheses.

Once the group is set as the sender, all group members will be able to see the message. They will begin receiving notifications about the group message per their notification preferences.

Once all the message information is entered and a target date selected, any of the group members can trigger the message to be scheduled, which will then go to Yodel for approval based on the selected target date and current lead times. Approval is held until the target date approaches so that final pricing can use the most up-to-date address information.

Once approved, the message will be ready for pricing confirmation. Standard group members are not alerted to this and do not see final pricing information. Only the group owners or admin are able to confirm pricing which then allows Yodel to begin the printing and sending.

Group Message Responses & Analytics

After a message has been sent, it will start to collect analytics for the send from the number of recipients and which delivery method was used, to the number of online views. When a recipient chooses to reply or react to your message, those will be available to view online as well. All group members are able to see these details and responses.

Delete or Block Group Members

Group owners and admin are allowed to delete members. This simply removes a user from the group, but there is no hinderance to them if they wanted to request to rejoin in the future.

Yodel also allows group owners and admin to permanently block members. This can be helpful if a persistent person has requested to join after multiple declines. Blocking the user allows Yodel to realize that they've been officially banned from the group, and we will not send further notifications to the admin about their attempts to join.

Leave a Group

All members are free to leave a group at any time. Doing so will move the group to the user's "archived groups" tab, making it easy to find the group again and reactivate their membership. The member's name will still show in the group's "archived members" view, and an admin could choose to send a new invite to the user.

On the archived groups tab, the user can choose to officially delete themselves from the group. This will also remove their name from the group's "archived members" view.

Archive or Delete a Group

Only the owners of a group are allowed to archive it for all members. If they wish to prevent the group from sending future messages, archiving it will disable all other admin and members from selecting the group as a sender.

Once the group has been archived, previous owners are still able to fully delete the group as well. Deletion of a group removes it from visibility for all past members, even owners and admin.