Email all members, but exclude employees

You are correct that the mass email option  How do I send an ad-hoc mass email to community members? is inclusive and not exclusive. The tool does allow you to email roles, so if you have all customers in a role, and no employees, then that could be a potential workaround. Although if you have many customers and they aren't already in a role, then that may be too great of an undertaking.

Also thinking an automation could be built to add all registered users to a role, but then remove anyone with a @companyname.com domain.

Anyone else have an idea here that could accommodate the ask?

You are correct - we don't have all customers in a role. There aren't special permissions for just customers, so we didn't add this.

I'll keep following to see if someone else has ideas about that automation or other solutions. Thanks!

I do not know of a way to do this out of the box without a role based as Grant suggested.

However, it should be possible to use the APIs to list users, check their roles and/or groups, and queue an outbound email -- all done with a small custom widget or even a separate custom administration panel. 

I think for net new users you can use the Auto Add New User to a Role based on Email Domain automation from the Marketplace to put your employees in one role (Employees) and then everyone that doesn't match your employee domain in a separate role (Customers).  For the latter, see screenshot below.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is retroactive, so you would have to figure out a way to put all the existing non-employee users in the proper role.  Grant Pankonien  or Michael Monteleone  - please let us know if there is an easy way to do that.  

  - It isn't the ideal solution, but you can use Microsoft Mail Merge to do this.  If you go to Administration > Reports > Members > New Members you can do a custom date range starting before your community was created until the current day to catch all the users.  Then export the list as a CSV.  Delete the top few rows that have the report informaiton so the file only contains real data with the top being the label (Membership ID, Username, etc).  Then add a new column for User Type or whatever you want to call it and paste this formula in:

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("@company.com",D2)),"EMPLOYEE","CUSTOMER")

You will need to replace company.com with your email domain, and make sure that the email addresses are in the right column (D by default from the Report export).  This scans the cell (D2 in this example) for the string with your company's email domain and if it finds a match it will set it to EMPLOYEE and if it doesn't match it will set it to CUSTOMER.  Then after the formula executes in the first cell you can click and drag the bottom right corner of that cell to copy the formula to the end of your spreadsheet.  The result will be every user classified as either EMPLOYEE or CUSTOMER.  I usually then copy the entire new column of data and use paste values to put the resulting text in place instead of formulas.  Then you can filter the spreadsheet to just keep the CUSTOMERs and use Mail Merge to send them all an email.  I did something similar to this in the past with data exported from our previous platform but the concepts are the same.

Wow, Matt Nevill , you just made my week. THANK YOU. These instructions are so clear and they will work. Thank you so much!!!

Thanks for adding this, Matt!

Matt Nevill said:

Unfortunately, I don't think this is retroactive, so you would have to figure out a way to put all the existing non-employee users in the proper role.  Grant Pankonien  or Michael Monteleone  - please let us know if there is an easy way to do that. 

The automation could be adjusted so it runs a check to see if a user is in a given role, and if not, add them to that role as defined. e.g. when a user logs in, run the check and sort them into the appropriate roles. You're correct that right now the automation in the marketplace is checking for net new, but again, the check can be added/change to check when a user logs in or the like.

The automation could also be adjusted so that it runs on an interval (nightly, etc), looking at all existing users, and ensuring the correct roles are applied - in addition to on log in of existing users or for new users.

Hello Grant Pankonien ! We are looking to use this mass email send based on roles, but we were wondering if there was a way to give Moderators or Group Managers permission to send a mass email too. We essentially want Group Managers to be able to easily email all the members of their group, is this possible or does this require Admin permissions? 

Thanks!

Hi Cesar Perez - great question. We do not have the ability for group owners to email group members (and limit to admins being able to email roles) directly for a number of reasons. Would like to know the use case in which you are emailing to help guide me, but here are some discussions on the topic:

 Send an email to all members of a group?

 RE: Email Group Members 

 Send an email to all group members as an group Admin?

Let me know what you're thinking and we can go from there. Thanks!

Two other possible options:

• @mention the Group Name in a post which generates a notification to all members
• This Automation could also be a possibility