Notify

An organization is always going to want to inform its' members about upcoming events and new information added to the web site along with contacting external resources about a myriad of subjects.  Volunteer rescue has e-mail built in to enable e-mails to be sent direct from the service.

Various parts of volunteer rescue can also send automatic e-mails including 

As automated e-mails are sent without intervention it is necessary to ensure the content of the e-mail is relevant to the notification it is for and for this volunteer rescue provides e-mail templates that combine fixed content with replacable tags that will be replaced with relevant information (e.g. member name, date of expiry) when the e-mail is actually sent; this ensures the format of the e-mail is desirable to the organization and not restricted to a format defined by volunteer rescue. 

Members can also opt to receive notifications as SMS (text) messages, when creating e-mails volunteer rescue provides for the entry of an SMS message as well; for automated notifications an SMS template can be added as per the automated e-mail template described above.

E-mail forwarding

Along with sending e-mails to its' members an organization and its' members will also receive e-mails from third parties, these will likely be to general positions in the organization such as president, training officer, general info etc....  In the past the members that fill these positions will often have given out their personal e-mail address which introduces two problems

Volunteer rescue allows an organization to create an unlimited number of forwarding e-mail addresses and when an e-mail is received at this address will forward the e-mail to one or more alternative e-mail addresses.  By creating forwarding e-mail addresses for these positions the problems above do not exist again, in the case of the position being filled by another member an organization just needs to change the e-mail address that e-mails sent to the address are forwarded to.

This feature is also useful when it is necessary to e-mail members of the group from a local e-mail client rather than the e-mail feature included in volunteer rescue, for example when the president receives an e-mail and decides it needs to be sent to all the executive, all the president needs to do is forward the e-mail from their local e-mail client to the address created for the executive and when the e-mail is received at the volunteer rescue e-mail server it will forward it to all the executive; again, as the exective changes all an organization needs to do is update the list of recipients.

Naturally this feature is integrated with member profiles therefore if a member subsequently changes their e-mail address all that member needs do is update the e-mail address in their profile and all e-mails will be sent to the members' new e-mail address.

To summarize this feature enables a centralized e-mail address book that keeps members' personal e-mail address private.