Connect settings and safety limits

Settings → Connect holds the two parish-wide dials behind Vianney Connect: the words that fill in when a personal touch has nothing to draw on, and the safety check that stands in front of a big send. You need the Settings permission to see this tab — in practice the priest or the parish administrator.

Personal touches — fallbacks

When a message says "Dear {{first_name}}," and a record has no first name, something has to print. That something is the fallback, and this card is where your parish decides what it says.

• First-name fallback — what stands in for a missing first name. "Friend" out of the box, so the line reads "Dear Friend,".
• Last-name fallback — usually left empty.
• Household fallback — "your household" out of the box.

Type your wording and click Save fallbacks. Each one is plain text, 60 characters or fewer, and can't itself contain a placeholder.

Two things worth knowing:
- These are the parish defaults. A sender can still override them for one message from the composer's Fallbacks… box — see Sending a message with Connect.
- {{parish_name}} has no fallback and needs none: it always resolves to your parish's display name.

Large-send safety check

Once a send is big enough, pressing Confirm no longer sends. Vianney first shows the sender the exact size, breaks the number down, asks them to tick any risks, and makes them type the total in. Three knobs set how that behaves.

• Size check starts at (people) — the total number of destinations (the confirmed plan plus any Cc/Bcc copies) at which the check appears. 200 out of the box; anything from 1 to 100000. Setting it low means more checks, not fewer sends.
• Recent sign-in required within (minutes) — for those large sends, how fresh the sender's sign-in must be. 15 minutes out of the box. If they signed in longer ago than that, Vianney asks them to sign in again and come back to Review; nothing goes out in the meantime. Set it to 0 to turn the sign-in check off and keep the size check.
• Size check is good for (minutes) — how long a check stays valid once issued. 10 out of the box, anything from 1 to 60. Let it lapse and the sender simply re-reviews and confirms again with fresh numbers.

Click Save safety check when you're done.

What the sender actually sees

• If their sign-in is older than the window above, a short card asking them to sign in again and come back to Review — and nothing else. The numbers only appear once the sign-in is fresh.
• The total destinations, then the breakdown: how many by email, how many by text, how many by both, how many external addresses, how many explicit copies, how many excluded, and how many audience sources fed the list.
• A tick box for each risk Vianney found: the audience includes a youth-protected group, the message contains links to sites outside the parish, or the audience changed since they were last prompted. Every listed box must be ticked.
• A box to type the exact total into, then Confirm again.

A check is tied to the message and the audience it was issued for. Edit either afterwards and it is refused with the new numbers rather than sending the old plan, and a check can authorise exactly one send — it can never be reused.

There is no bypass

This is worth saying plainly, because someone will eventually ask. Every route that confirms a Connect send runs this check — the office's Review screen, a scheduled send, a group leader confirming from the portal. There is no setting, no role, and no back door that skips it. The only way to make it appear less often is to raise the threshold, and the only way past it is to read the numbers and confirm them.

Related

• Choosing how a message is delivered — where the size check turns up in the ordinary send flow.
• Sending to several groups, people, and segments — combined audiences, where the breakdown earns its keep.
• Changes to these settings are recorded in the audit trail.