How to send a message with Vianney Connect

In Vianney Connect (the Connect item in your navigation), a group message — an announcement — is one message sent to a whole group at once. Here is the full path from blank page to delivered — right away or on a schedule.

Compose and send

• 1. Go to Connect → Compose. What opens looks like a letter rather than a form: a To row, a Subject line, and a clean page to write on.
• 2. In the To row, type into the Add a group or person… box. One search covers your groups, the parish records, and your saved lists at once; click what you meant and it becomes a small pill in the row. A group's pill wears its resolved size — "Choir families (62)" — so you know the reach before you have written a word, and the ✕ on any pill takes it back out. A message still needs one group to send under (build one first if needed — see Building a recipient group); people and saved lists ride along on top of it.
• 3. At the right of the same row, the small via dropdown says how the message travels: Email, Text, Email preferred, Text preferred, or Email + text. See Choosing how a message is delivered.
• 4. Watch the quiet line under the To row. It keeps a running count as you add people — how many recipients, how many are reachable by email, how many have no email and would be skipped — and it ends "estimate; the review screen is the final word", because it is.
• 5. For email, type the Subject.
• 6. Choose the shape of the message on the row of tabs: Plain message, Newsletter, or Designer. A newsletter or a designed layout can only travel by email, so picking one locks the via dropdown to Email and tells you why. Full screen hands the editor the whole window when you want room; Esc brings you back.
• 7. Write. While the page is still blank a quiet Start from strip offers your first few templates and a Browse library ▸ link; it fades away the moment you start writing and returns if you empty the box. To have Vianney draft it instead, click ✦ Draft with AI at the foot of the page and edit what comes back — if your parish has switched this helper off in Settings → AI add-on, the button simply isn't there and you write the message yourself.
• 8. (Email) To copy others — staff or particular parishioners — click Cc/Bcc at the end of the To row to fold those boxes open and add them with the recipient picker; each receives their own copy. The link then carries the count, so attached copies are never a surprise.
• 9. Click Review & send. Vianney opens an on-page Review step — this is the confirm, not a popup.

Personal touches: greeting each person by name

At the foot of the page, beside Save draft, sits a quiet Personal touch button with a small arrow. Click it and a short menu opens with the four placeholders below. Click one and it drops a placeholder in where your cursor is. At send time every recipient sees their own value in its place — one message, written once, that greets each person by name.

• {{first_name}} — the person's first name exactly as it is recorded in People. Never a nickname: a preferred name would be a guess, and Vianney never guesses.
• {{last_name}} — their last name.
• {{household_name}} — the name of the household they belong to.
• {{parish_name}} — your parish's display name. This one always resolves, so it never needs a fallback.

So "Dear {{first_name}}," arrives as "Dear Mary," for Mary and "Dear John," for John.

Personal touches work in the Subject, the plain Message, the text version that texting recipients get, and anything you build in the Designer. Placeholder text typed inside a Newsletter (blocks) block is the one exception for now — it prints exactly as written instead of being filled in.

Setting the fallbacks

Not every record is complete, and no message should ever go out reading "Dear ,". When a person's value is missing, Vianney prints a fallback instead — out of the box, "Friend" for a first name, nothing for a last name, and "your household". Your parish's own wording lives in Settings → Connect; see Connect settings and safety limits.

To change the wording for this one message only, open the same Personal touch menu and click Fallbacks… at the bottom of it, type what you want, and click Save fallbacks. (Vianney saves the draft before it opens that box, so the message needs its group and some content first.) What you set here beats the parish default, and the parish default beats the built-in one. No recipient ever sees an unfilled placeholder.

If you type something in braces that is not one of the four — {{parish_phone}}, say — the Fallbacks box warns you it is not a personal touch and will go out as literal text.

Seeing it through a recipient's eyes

In the Newsletter and Designer editors, click Preview email. A plain message has no preview button of its own — you see it through a recipient's eyes one step later, with See it as a recipient on the Review step described below. A personalized draft previews as one clearly named sample person: the line above it reads "Previewing as ...", and Preview as someone else… lets you search a name and look through their eyes instead.

The Review step

Clicking Review & send opens the Final Review — the one on-page confirm (no separate approval queue). It shows, side by side:
- Audience — the confirmed plan: exactly who will receive it, counted once, and who is excluded (unsubscribed, or no email on file), with a link to see the excluded names. A group's external addresses appear here as "+ N external email addresses." When you have added Cc/Bcc copies, Vianney also shows the total destinations — the confirmed plan plus those explicit copies.
- Personal touches — when the message uses any, Review names each one and prints the exact fallback wording that will fill the gaps, so the personalization is part of what you confirm. The preview frame shows the message as written; See it as a recipient swaps it for one real rendered copy (a display aid — what you confirm is still the message plus those fallback facts).
- Copies (Cc/Bcc) — group leaders see the actual Cc and Bcc addresses, with Bcc marked "hidden from recipients." A plain sender who isn't a leader can't confirm a message that carries Cc or Bcc copies — Vianney asks them to hand it to a group leader or the parish office.
- Delivery and link checks — a plain note on what can actually be delivered right now (email and texting are still being connected), plus a loud warning if any action button points at an unpublished form, a revoked join link, or an archived group.
- Test send — click Send test to me to get a copy at your own address, marked [TEST], before committing — it never counts as a real send.
- When — choose Send now or Schedule… (pick a date and time).
- A live preview of what recipients will see.

While the message is a draft, its count reads as an estimate ("currently planned"); confirming freezes it as the confirmed plan. When you are satisfied, click Confirm & send — the same button confirms either a Send-now or a Schedule choice. That single click is the only action that sends — clicking it twice can't send twice. On a large send, one more size check appears at this point before anything goes out; see Connect settings and safety limits.

Scheduling

Choosing Schedule… on the Review step, picking a date and time, and clicking confirm is the same approval as sending now — nothing further is needed, and nothing goes out until the moment you chose. Vianney delivers it automatically at that time and moves it to History. Find it beforehand in the Scheduled tab, where you can cancel it any time before it fires (it goes back to a plain draft).

Templates

Save time on a message you send often. While the page is still blank, the Start from strip offers your first few templates — click one and its subject and content load straight into the draft, ready to edit. Browse library ▸ on the same strip opens the full Template Library, where Use on any row does the same thing. From the old picker you could also start from a template — pick one and click Use to load its subject and content into a new draft, then edit as needed. Or, from a message you've already written, click Save as template to add it to the library for next time.

Connect now has a Template Library tab of its own, where saved content carries an approval state and a version history — see The Connect Template Library. Two rules follow from that: a template shared with the parish or a group must be approved before anyone else can start a draft from it, and a group's welcome template must be approved too — Vianney won't accept an unapproved (or archived) template as the thing that greets a new member.

Save for later

Not ready? Click Save draft to park it in the Drafts tab. Each draft is a compact row with Edit, Send, and Delete right on the line; click the row to reveal the message body. Search, filter, and sort help you find one when the list grows. Opening a draft from All Messages takes you to its full message-detail screen, which carries an Edit draft button at the top — one click reopens it in the composer, already populated.

What happens on send

• Email delivers right away when your parish email is connected; if not, recipients are recorded as skipped with a reason.
• Text records for now and sends once texting is live.
• A summary shows how many were sent, skipped, or failed, and the message appears in History; open any message to see its full message-detail screen.
• Every email carries a personal Unsubscribe link in the footer. Clicking it opens a short confirm page — the parishioner presses Confirm unsubscribe before anything changes, so an email app's link preview or scanner can't accidentally opt someone out.

Tips

• Cc/Bcc is email-only and hides for text.
• The Review step's confirm button — whether set to send now or scheduled — is the only approval step; there is no separate draft-then-approve queue, by design.
• Draft with AI only ever sees the placeholder text, never anybody's actual name or household — the real values are filled in at send time, long after the AI has finished.