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Contact patrons that have registered for events or reserved spaces via the LocalHop communication portal. Filter guests as needed and customize your messages to communicate important updates, notifications, or changes for events and reservations.

Create Email

Begin selecting your email audience by selecting “Create Email” in the Communications Portal dropdown in the left navigation.

There are four options to begin creating your audience. Each of these options can then be further refined once initial audience selection has been populated. Note: These can include past events and reservations by selecting a date range that begins in the past.

Select Audience 

By Date Range – Find guests that have registered for rooms and booked spaces within a selected date range. Toggle between event registrations and room reservations using the gray buttons. Select and deselect reservations and events using the checkboxes. Note: Contacts will include patrons that are on waitlists for selected events, there is currently no way to remove these individuals except in the select guest screen in the next step.

Once you have finished, select the green “Continue” button.

By Event – Focus your communication on event guests only. Search by date range or using a keyword to find related or similar events. Select and deselect events as needed using the checkboxes.

Once you have finished, select the green “Continue” button.

By Room – Focus your communications on patrons that have reserved rooms or other spaces. You will have the option to select all your available rooms/spaces within a selected date range or select individual rooms that have reservations. Note – The default setting will have all the rooms selected, make all your Rooms changes before selecting the green “SEARCH” button.

Once you have finished, select the green “Continue” button.

By Guest – Search by individual guest names or last names to communicate with those patrons. Note – Multiple search queries cannot be done for the guest audience option.

Once you have finished, select the green “Continue” button.

Create Email

SUBJECT* (required field)

This will be the subject line of your email. Here are a few suggestions to help your email stand out for your patrons.

• Keep the subject line short (5-9 words)
• If the communication contains time sensitive or important information – include it in the beginning of the subject line (e.g., CLASS CANCELLED, BUILDING CLOSED, BAD WEATHER, CLASS RESCHEDULED)
• Even if it’s not an urgent communication, make sure your subject line is informative

SENDER* (required field)

This is the email address that your patrons will see the email coming from. The default sender is set to info@getlocalhop.com. Please see additional documentation below on how to test and change this email address to one that patrons are more familiar with from your organization. This field can only be changed in the Customize Style section in the left navigation under the Communication Portal dropdown.

REPLY TO* (required field)

This is the email address that responses will go to when a patron replies to the communication email that is sent to them.

MESSAGE* (required field)

Craft your message in this field, including all important information, next steps, and how contacts should proceed after reading your message. Note – A formatting toolbar will be available in an upcoming release.  

When you have finished composing your email, select the green “Send” button.

Customize Style

Customize settings for all your communications to create a uniform look for your organization, creating an email template for all administrators using the communication portal.

FONT FAMILY

Select your preferred email font from the pre-set options. Use the arrows to move over active fonts and rearrange them in the order you would like (most preferred at the top of the list). These fonts will work for most email providers so you can guarantee that your recipient will receive one of your preferred fonts.

FONT SIZE

Select a preferred font size for your custom email. The default and suggested font size is 12.

SENDER (EMAIL ADDRESS) * (required field)

The email address that your patrons will see the email coming from. Please see documentation below to change this email to one your patrons will recognize as coming from your organization. Note – The new email address must be tested to assure it will deliver correctly to your email list.

EMAIL BANNER (optional)

Add a custom email banner that will appear at the top of your communication portal emails that your organization sends out. The recommended size for the banner is 1800×468 pixels.

Communication List

View your organization’s communication history.

Refine your search by keyword and date using the search bar. The list will display the date sent, subject line, message, and user that created/sent the communication.

Select the green “View” button on a communication to display additional information, including a complete list of all emails that received the email. Note – If an email bounces it will appear in red font in this list.

Accessing Communications through other modules in LocalHop.

Look for the gray “Communications” button at the top right of Room Reservation and Event modules to access the communications portal pop-up screens.

Communication Portal – Changing Your Sender Email

When changing the sender email from the default info@getlocalhop.com, you will see this message upon saving.

You will need to send a sample to ensure that the email you are using is compatible. The test email will be sent to the email address you are logged in with. Select the gray “SEND SAMPLE” button to proceed.

If you receive the test email, you can successfully save then continue to create and send your email. Yay!

If you do not receive the email, please follow these steps.

To use a different sender email address other than “info@getlocalhop.com” found under Communications Portal / Create Email tab, you will need access to your DNS hosting provider. This will be needed later to create a txt record which verifies that you gave permission to allow our application to send out emails using your email address.

Some popular DNS hosting providers include

• GoDaddy
• Cloudflare
• Amazon Web Services
• DNS Manager
• Namecheap

Initiating The Process

Using another email other than info@getlocalhop.com requires additional work for both the client and LocalHop to setup correctly. To initiate the process, please send us an email or contact us by phone and say you’d like to use your own sender email address for communications portal.

How This Will Work

Once you initiate the process, we will send over another email with 2 txt records that you will need to create inside your DNS settings. A sample txt record may look like this:

Host Name

your-domain.com

v=spf1 include:spf.YOUR-DNS.net include:spf.mandrillapp.com ~all

mandrill._domainkey.your-domain.com

v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIGGSDWTGGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCrLHiExVd55zd/IQ/J/mRwSRMAocV/hMB3jXwaHH36d9NaVynQFYV8NaWi69c1veUtRzGt7yAioXqLj7Z4TeEUoOLgrKsn8YnckGs9i3B3tVFB+Ch/4mPhXWiNfNdynHWBcPcbJ8kjEQ2U8y78dHZj1YeRXXVvWob2OaKynO8/lQIDAQAB;

Once those records are created, send us over notification that those steps are complete on your side and we will confirm on our side that it’s working. Once we confirm that it’s working – you will receive a confirmation email from us.

Final Step

To ensure everything works for you – please send a test email to an email outside of the organization to confirm that none of the emails get marked as spam and show up in their inbox. You can send a test email from the Communication Style screen within the LocalHop Admin Portal. Update the Sender email address and click the Send Sample button.