Mass Communications - Overview

Overview

Mass Communication is a transformative feature designed to empower ISPs with the ability to send targeted, bulk communications to specific customer cohorts.

This feature enables ISPs to craft and dispatch relevant messages based on customized criteria, such as service area, network provider, or customer segment; directly through the Admin panel.

By utilizing a straightforward two-step process to define the recipient list and select an appropriate communication template, ISPs can efficiently manage and execute large-scale communications for service updates, outage notifications, and more, ensuring that essential information is communicated effectively and promptly to those impacted.

Accessing the Mass Communications Feature

Accessing this area requires the Admin > Mass Communications permission enabled

1. Access the Admin menu
2. Select the Mass actions tab
3. Click on Send message

How Mass Communications Works

Think of the Mass Communications feature as a large to-do list for gaiia.

A list of accounts and message to send are provided to gaiia, and it works through each one sending out the desired message to the recipient.

Specifically, there are two major components of it:

1. Building the “to-do” list of all the accounts and message that needs to be sent.
2. Sending out the message through the Email provider (i.e. Sendgrid, Mailgun), and tracking the result.

Due to this divide, the mass communications feature tracks two different things:

1. Did we successfully complete the task of attempting to send the message out
2. If the message was sent, did it reach the recipients and what were the results?

This context will be important to understand latter concepts and components

Feature Overview

1. Ability to customize, create or re-use a custom template using the same editor as the regular Customer Communications
2. Support both SMS and Email in the same communication, as well as multi-language support
3. Flexible CSV import that provides you full control over which accounts are receiving the communication
4. Dedicated view to track all mass communications that were sent and the ability to quickly review them

   This includes a list for each mass communication that tracks all accounts that were part of it, and the ability to review the actual message they received

5. A dedicated area for each mass communication to track messages that could not be sent out for easy remediation
6. Dedicated view that provides an overview of the message sent for record keeping

Key Considerations to Keep in Mind About Mass Communications

Comments on the CSV process have been excluded, and are instead covered in Building the CSV for Mass Communications

There is often a delay from sending a Mass Communication out to when we receive a response back from the email provider.
Please be patient and periodically check back for updates.

This feature should only be used for transactional emails. gaiia does not support its use for marketing purposes.
This means the account must exist in gaiia in order to be able to send a message to them.

1. Mass communications can be exited at any point, and all progress is automatically saved.
2. Messages are currently sent out as soon as you click the Send Message button during the Review & Send step.
   

   Scheduling is currently a feature on our roadmap, but the Draft functionality can be used in the meantime to keep a message in draft, and sending it when required.

3. When building a Mass Communication, you have the flexibility to determine which message types to send ((Email and/or SMS), and selecting the languages you are targeting.
4. If both an SMS and Email template is provided, and if an account has indicated a preference for both, they will receive both messages.
5. Based on the account’s language preference, your customers will receive the appropriate language-specific version of the message.
6. The number of messages sent may not always equal the accounts provided.
   

   This is usually the case when both an Email and SMS communication is being sent

7. The entire message used for the Mass Communication is based on one of your custom template.
   • An entirely new template can be used just for that communication, but will not be saved for later use.
   • An existing custom template can be used and modified to easily re-use an existing structure and for quickly applying contextual changes, but the modifications will not be saved for later use.
8. The messages will be sent through the existing Email provider used within your instance of gaiia.
9. The CSV import process has a number of key validation checks in place, but it is still the responsibility of the user to validate they are pulling the appropriate accounts to send the mass communication to.
10. Mass Communications always uses the latest account information from gaiia to send out the messages. Please ensure it is accurate before sending mass communications.