Agree with others that it would be great to be able to sort template emails in folders for different themes/topics. Our template area is a MESS!

Would like to be able to format the email message when manually sending an invoice. The formatting is centered (once message is sent), and looks very unprofessional.

When scheduling an email for future delivery, we would like to designate the time day (approximate) that the email is queued. As it is now, the email is scheduled to be delivered at the same time of day as the start of the event. For example, if our event has an evening start time, say 6 pm, event emails can only be delivered at or near 6 PM (when scheduled in advance); it would be better to have these emails delivered during the work day or early morning so there is a better chance they will be read.
Also, I believe it is better to designate a date for delivery rather than "days ahead" as it is now - I recommend that you reverse the function to have the user input a date and have the site indicate how many days ahead that date actually is.

We've studied the ideas and comments in this thread and created a prototype to try some of them. If you have some time please check it out here - https://wildapricot.invisionapp.com/share/M2BQA98RT#/screens

Important to know: This is just a prototype, a promo, not a working solution, so be cautious there are only few actions available on the screen.

What exactly changed:
List view instead of tile
More actions on the list
Email templates are now created using email composing wizard
No more thumbnails for now

We have few questions for you:
Will this workflow be better for you?
Did we miss anything?
Other comments...

To leave your feedback please email us at husky.crew@wildapricot.com or add your comments here.

List view would help, but further organization would be awesome! Trying to locate a specific email template (which we often recycle or come back to over and over) is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

We have a small copyright notice in the footer of all our e-mail templates. Having just a "current year" macro would save me the yearly effort of updating this in all 29 e-mail templates (yes, I have a list I work from).

Sample usage:

Copyright (c) 2010-{Organization_Current_Year} {Organization_Name}

I am no longer so embarrassed that I was not saving my template work more often, because now I see the reason why. Rather than just "saving" work, we have to save and quit the editor, then restart the editor, which (on the job I'm doing at least), takes the better part of a minute. Disrupting the user's thought process for frequent minute-long time-outs invites the user to put them off. We need a "save" button that saves in the background, while working continues.

Autosave templates that are being being worked on. You do this for emails that are being sent. Why not for the "original." I clicked on a link to check the link code, and instead of highlighting, the browser took me heaven knows where, trashing half my work. Yes, I know I should "Save Often," but I'm human. If nothing else, pop up a prompt reminder ever so often. WE ARE NOT ALL PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMMERS.

We have many Chapters around the country, and I absolutely agree with a previous comment that if templates could be put into labeled files this would go a long way towards helping us organize these templates.
Such as a Colorado file, in which they could add additional labeled files titled as needed, such as by year, month or subject.
I tried to do this by adding a folder in the EmailTemplates folder, but it does not appear to work.

I wish email templates would be in order from Z to A so when I name them by date I would be able to see the newest one first instead of last as it is now. I lose time every day scrolling down the list to locate my current template, especially since the last update when we get sent back to the template list way too often! The backup arrow goes to an email list instead of back to the template being worked on type issue.

Merged, thanks Alex

https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/10977162-insert-current-date-and-time-in-email-templates

This is a duplicate with another item which has 4 votes -- maybe a good idea to consolidate?

The current date/time can be used on an email blast when you're not using the built in invoice/automation for memberships. There are times when you want to manually send reminders even invoices using the macro customization. The current/date and time models existing forms of invoices.

Most templates when they are moved over from other systems (manual or otherwise) prominently display date/time. I actually thought this was a built in {} macro, but surprised to find it is not.

How would you change it to make it clear?

The logic of how WA saves e-mail templates escapes me. I end up with copies of copies of templates by following the normal logic of [save] and [save as] that applies anywhere else.

After just a few years, we have a hodgepodge of old emails, your templates, our emails to be reused as templates and some actual WA templates we custom built with your initial guidance. The template folder is a mess, and we can't tell one from another because the names are cut off and few have thumbnails. (1) Display full template names. (2) Automatically generate thumbnail image of template as it currently appears. (3) Create someplace for us to put inactive or old, unused (but someday maybe needed) templates and emails (currently we start their file names with "z"! (4) Distinguish between Templates and Emails in the list (Templates should usually be untouched, maybe even copy-only, like yours are, while emails created from the templates are stored i the same list!) and and (5) Let us sort the template list by name, date, etc. You might as well bring the automatic Announcement template system into the manual mail system, since to the user they are essentially the same and (an organization having a customary face) should be interchangeable. BTW, your Email Drafts list is pretty useless to us, as its full of old garbage (requiring time-wasting maitenance) and doesn't show us contents. Looks like IBM-DOS.

Have a search feature in the Email Templates. It would save a lot of time if we could enter search criteria to find templates.

List view would be preferable to grid view

Thanks for your feedback, we are planning to make some changes in custom templates in the future. Tags, folders or something else to better organize mailings is being analyzed.

We have 1 additional question: how do you search your templates? By image or by name? Maybe a list view, not a grid view, is more suitable for custom templates. What do you think?

Lily
Emailing development team