Tech Forum

Would love to be able to schedule messages to go out. The ability to "Send Now", or "Send on" with a date and local time filter. Would be super handy.

sareid wrote:Would love to be able to schedule messages to go out. The ability to "Send Now", or "Send on" with a date and local time filter. Would be super handy.

+1. I've had this same thought.

Some members want to unsubscribe from receiving email (and text messages from withing LDS Tools). As a bishopric we don't want to delete their email address (or phone number) so we can contact them for other needs. We need a way to manage this request. Currently, we have to keep a separate list. Sometimes ward leaders send out messages without checking our separate unsubscribe list and then the recipient gets upset. We suggest adding this capability for leadership and/or members to set their subscribe preferences while also maintaining the ability for church leaders to call, text or email for individual (not bulk messages) or for messages being sent from church headquarters. Has this been discussed and is this on the road map?

If you use the privacy options and select Private, only the leaders can see the contact information on a member. I did a little experimenting with this by briefly changing our RS president to Private. I then logged into the Directory using my wife's login. The president's information was not available and when I used the 'send email,' her name did not appear on the list of other RS leaders getting the email. I'm assuming this same privacy setting is in LDS Tools as soon as it is synced. This might answer your question.

pauldjohnston wrote:Some members want to unsubscribe from receiving email (and text messages from withing LDS Tools). As a bishopric we don't want to delete their email address (or phone number) so we can contact them for other needs. We need a way to manage this request. Currently, we have to keep a separate list. Sometimes ward leaders send out messages without checking our separate unsubscribe list and then the recipient gets upset. We suggest adding this capability for leadership and/or members to set their subscribe preferences while also maintaining the ability for church leaders to call, text or email for individual (not bulk messages) or for messages being sent from church headquarters. Has this been discussed and is this on the road map?

No one in this user-to-user help forum will probably be able to answer to your question. The best way to get this request heard is to use feedback from within the app. You may not receive an individualized response, but that is the official way to make your request known to those who set the programmer's priorities.

I'd like to second some of the complaints here in the thread about messages send from within LCR not reaching some email recipients. I'm a ward clerk and regularly have to send out emails using the "send message" feature withing LCR.

Most recipients will receive my messages. Some however do not. So far I wasn't able to figure out any reasons for it. All the usual suspects (spam folder, wrong email address ...) have already been ruled out.

So here is definitely some kind of problem going on with the way emails are sent out by LCR. I would appreciate any kind of support or help regarding this issue.

sebastian.buck wrote:I'd like to second some of the complaints here in the thread about messages send from within LCR not reaching some email recipients. I'm a ward clerk and regularly have to send out emails using the "send message" feature withing LCR.

Most recipients will receive my messages. Some however do not. So far I wasn't able to figure out any reasons for it. All the usual suspects (spam folder, wrong email address ...) have already been ruled out.

So here is definitely some kind of problem going on with the way emails are sent out by LCR. I would appreciate any kind of support or help regarding this issue.

There are many variables that could be the cause and without an admin on the recipient end and an admin on the lds.org end testing it together, I don't know that we'll figure out the edge cases. Awhile back I glanced at the SPF headers in the received emails and they do look ok.

I wonder if some mail servers see the from: address and the reply-to: address being different and it starts to get flagged as spam or rejected before even received. In other words, you may get different rejections than another clerk/secretary/email address that is different than yours. Maybe gmail.com works but yahoo.com doesn't. Or, variations like that. I have a ward member with an @familysearch.org address that doesn't get my emails via 'send a message' but everyone else seems to get them.

Our stake is seeing an issue start to come up where sisters are being called by the Bishops as "Ward Communication Specialists" to expressly send out announcements to members ( vision of a Digital Bulletin perhaps), as the church has directed units to reduce over the pulpit announcements with the new schedule. A work around is in place for wards whom call a brother, as the ward can assign them with assistant clerk permissions. From what I understand, The system does not allow this for sisters. I've have a Sister contacting me (Stake Clerk) to help her get permissions to Send to All Members. I think it would be wise to consider creating a "Communications" position in the system which would allow for Adult Brethren and Sisters to be able to have the permissions to utilize "Send A Message". I already know its going to be a bit of an uncomfortable conversation with the sister contacting me, that in order to do her calling she has to send the communication to a Man (assistant clerk) in the Bishopric to then send out the message. The irony is I'm sure the calling was given to reduce that burden on Bishopric members...

tomj wrote:Our stake is seeing an issue start to come up where sisters are being called by the Bishops as "Ward Communication Specialists" to expressly send out announcements to members ( vision of a Digital Bulletin perhaps), as the church has directed units to reduce over the pulpit announcements with the new schedule. A work around is in place for wards whom call a brother, as the ward can assign them with assistant clerk permissions. From what I understand, The system does not allow this for sisters. I've have a Sister contacting me (Stake Clerk) to help her get permissions to Send to All Members. I think it would be wise to consider creating a "Communications" position in the system which would allow for Adult Brethren and Sisters to be able to have the permissions to utilize "Send A Message". I already know its going to be a bit of an uncomfortable conversation with the sister contacting me, that in order to do her calling she has to send the communication to a Man (assistant clerk) in the Bishopric to then send out the message. The irony is I'm sure the calling was given to reduce that burden on Bishopric members...

Some callings for women do have access to send-a-message. https://lcr.lds.org/access-table?lang=eng

I will also note that using the ward/branch calendar on lds.org does allow for Events to send out reminder emails in advance. We're starting to use that and the organizations can populate their own events and control the email notification's timing. We have moved to a digital sacrament program and announcements each week. We have an assistant clerk in charge of it (with edits by the ward clerk as needed when sitting in meetings). It's working well.

So far, I think I prefer those needing to communicate to do so themselves rather than trying to funnel all communication through a single person. It ends up being just as much work to communicate that info to the 'communicator' than to just do it yourself (as a clerk, organization, bishopric, etc).

An option might be to list their calling as RS Assistant Secretary, with the permission of the bishop and RS President of course.