Vianney Connect: groups, messages, and announcements

Vianney Connect (the Connect item in your navigation — formerly "Mass Communications") is for groups, messages, and announcements: communicate with your parish and help groups stay connected. A lector reminder, a holy-day schedule, a parish-wide note all live here. It has ten tabs and opens on All Messages.

The ten tabs

• All Messages — the landing tab: every message (draft, scheduled, sent) in one table, newest first, so you can find anything without hunting through the other tabs. Above the table, a search box covering the subject, the audience, and the message body sits beside a status filter and a sort dropdown, with a quiet count of how many of the total are showing. Click any row to open its full message-detail screen.
• Groups — the audiences you send to, either a fixed list of people or a rule (a "segment") that resolves itself. See Building a recipient group.
• Joining — the one place people-joining lives: text-to-join keywords, share links and QR codes, and pending join requests across your groups. See Share links, QR codes, and welcoming new members.
• Template Library — the parish's reusable content: starter templates from Vianney, anything your staff have saved, each with an approval state and a version history. See The Connect Template Library.
• Compose — one calm page that reads like a letter: a To row where you add the group (and, if you like, individual people or a saved list), a subject, a page to write on, and one Review & send at the foot. Save it as a draft, send it now, or schedule it. See Sending a message with Connect.
• Drafts — messages you saved to finish later.
• Scheduled — sends you have queued up for a future date and time. Cancel one any time before it goes out; once it fires, it moves to History.
• Replies — incoming replies to a communication, waiting for a look. Search by sender or subject, and sort newest first, oldest first, or by sender.
• History — a read-only log of everything sent, with delivery counts. Search by subject or audience, narrow it by status, or sort by most opened.
• Insights — open and click activity, delivery totals, opt-outs, and subscriber growth by group.

What runs through it

• Every message still goes out as a group. The group is the sender identity, and it is what an Unsubscribe link belongs to — which is why a message can't leave without one. On top of that group you can drop individual parishioners and saved lists into the same To row, so a note to the choir plus three extra people is one message and not two.
• Composing walks you through audience → content → an on-page Review step (with a real preview and an optional test send) → confirm. Confirming Send on the Review step commits it immediately; confirming after choosing Schedule is the same approval, just for a future time you chose. The Review step is the confirm — there is no separate popup and no approval queue.
• Email goes out when your parish email is connected; texting sends once your parish's texting is set up.

What the provider reported

Open any sent message and, below the results, you will find a card headed What the provider reported. "Sent" in the results above means the email company accepted the copy from us; this card is what it told us afterwards — delivered, bounced, or reported as spam, address by address, with the time and the reason.

• The card only fills in once your email provider's event feed is switched on. Until then it simply isn't there, rather than showing zeros that would look like bad news.
• A hard bounce (the address does not exist) or a spam complaint parks that address: Vianney stops writing to it and records an honest "skipped" line instead, every time, until a person fixes the address and releases it.
• Releasing is a human act with a Release suppression button right on that row — and releasing never resends the original message. See Why a message was skipped.

Tips

• For one-to-one pastoral replies, use Shepherd Notes instead — Communications is for the many.
• Groups never segment by sensitive categories like the sick list; those stay in Care.
• The Draft with AI button on Compose can be switched off per parish (Settings → AI add-on → Connect message drafts); Connect itself works the same either way, you just write the message yourself.