Sending to several groups, people, and segments

A Connect message always sends as one group — that group is the sender identity and what an Unsubscribe link applies to. But its audience can now be bigger: several groups, individual parishioners, and saved segments, combined in one send.

Building the audience

The quickest way is the To row itself. Type into the Add a group or person… box and pick groups, individual parishioners, and saved lists out of the one list of matches — each becomes a pill in the row. Anything you pick before the draft is saved is held quietly and added the moment you Save draft.

Saving also opens the fuller Audience box just beneath the To row, with its own picker for each kind and the running tally of who is in and who is out. Either way, these are the three things you are adding:
- Groups — each resolves with its own membership and opt-outs. A group's external email addresses (recipients not in the parish directory) are deliberately left out of a combined audience — the Review step says so plainly; send to that one group on its own to include them.
- Individual people — picked from the parish records by name, or by email address (the address must match exactly one living parishioner; Vianney never sends to raw outside addresses from the builder).
- Saved segments — your existing criteria lists, straight from the People module. The builder remembers what the segment looked like when you chose it and warns if the definition changed since.

Who actually receives it

Vianney resolves every source, combines them, and counts each person once — someone in three selected groups gets one copy. Two different people who share a family email each still get their own copy (people are never merged). The preview shows exactly who is excluded and why: opted out of the sending group, waiting for join approval, no contact details, paused messages, or — for youth groups — minors, whose copy goes to their guardians instead (never directly; a minor with no reachable guardian is shown, never silently dropped).

The confirmed plan

While the message is still a draft, its audience count is an estimate — "currently planned" — because a selected group or segment can still move under it. When you confirm (send now or schedule), that estimate becomes the confirmed plan and the exact recipient list is frozen. Someone joining a selected group later — or a segment changing — can never quietly grow a scheduled send. The list can only shrink for safety: someone who opts out, or passes away, before a scheduled send fires is removed automatically, and the record shows it. Unscheduling withdraws the plan; confirming again rebuilds it fresh.

The size check — where overlap finally shows its work

Combining sources is exactly how a send gets big without anyone meaning it to. So once a send reaches the size your parish sets (200 destinations out of the box), pressing Confirm brings up a size check before anything goes out:

• 1. Your sign-in has to be recent first. If yours is older than your parish's window (15 minutes out of the box), Vianney asks you to sign in again and return to Review — you see nothing else until you do, and nothing has been sent.
• 2. Then it gives you the resolved total — every source merged, each person counted once, plus any Cc/Bcc copies — and 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 went into it. If four groups and a segment collapsed to 380 people rather than the 640 on paper, this is where you see it.
• 3. Any risks are listed as tick boxes you must tick: a youth-protected group is in the audience, the message carries links outside the parish, or the audience changed since you were last prompted — the one that matters most when several moving segments feed a send.
• 4. You type the exact total into the box and press Confirm again.

The check is good for a set number of minutes (10 out of the box), and it is tied to the message and audience you were looking at — add a group afterwards and it is refused, with fresh numbers, rather than sending the old plan. There is no bypass. The thresholds and windows are set in Settings → Connect; see Connect settings and safety limits.

When someone is skipped anyway

Beyond the exclusions listed above, one reason cuts across every source: an email address that hard-bounced or was reported as spam is parked, and every send skips it — recorded with its reason — until a person repairs it and releases it. Releasing never resends. See Why a message was skipped.

Good to know

• The Review step shows the compound numbers and warns loudly if the audience changed since you last looked.
• Classic single-group messages work exactly as before — the builder is optional.
• Your delivery choice (email only, text only, a preferred fallback, or both) applies to the whole combined audience — see Choosing how a message is delivered.
• Group leaders in the portal keep sending to their own groups; combined audiences are a parish-office tool.