If you are a scheduling administrator for a multilingual church that uses automatic email reminders for upcoming services, it is possible to use custom tokens to personalize the text of these emails so that -- for example -- at a church with both English-speaking volunteers and Spanish-speaking volunteers, Spanish-speaking volunteers will see the email in Spanish, while English-speaking volunteers will see the email in English.
Before setting up custom tokens for this automatic email, we will need to take a look at the default text of the email. To find this text:
- Go to the Web Terminal pane in MSP.
- Click on the "Web Terminal settings…” button. (If you do not see this button, click on the Home tab of the Web Terminal pane -- the "Web Terminal settings…” button will be visible from here.)
- In the Web Terminal settings pop-up window, go to the Auto Reminders section.
- To see the text used in the automatic reminders for upcoming services, click on the "Edit Email Body..." button found in this section. In the new pop-up window, you will see the default text for automatic reminder emails:
- Copy the text shown in this new window, and paste it into a Word document, email composition window, plain text file or anywhere else that can be used as a holding place for this text. (Note: Two of the tokens included in the body of this email -- the "InNDays" token and the "AutoEmailReminderServices" token -- can only be accessed and used from within this window, so we will not be able to include these tokens inside of the custom tokens we make. For our purposes, we will not need to use the "InNDays" token at all. We will need to leave the "AutoEmailReminderServices" token inside of the body of this email when we are adding our custom tokens later.)
- Now, we need to modify this text so that we will not need to use the "InNDays" token, and so that we can also place the "AutoEmailReminderServices" token right after this text, since this is the text we will be using to make our custom tokens. Your modified text should look similar to the following:
"Dear {{FirstName}},
Please remember that you are scheduled for an upcoming assignment.
You can see who else is scheduled at that time and access other information about the service by clicking the date of the service. To see your full list of scheduled times you may log into your Web Terminal at:
{{WebTerminalHomePageLink}}
Your upcoming assigned position is:" - Translate your modified text into Spanish to get the text that we will include in the custom token we make for our Spanish-speaking volunteers (do NOT translate the "FirstName" token or the "WebTerminalHomePage" token -- leave those as they are written).
Next, we need to make our custom tokens:
- Go to the Web Terminal pane in MSP.
- Click on the "Token" menu and choose "Token options..." from the drop-down menu:
- In the new pop-up box, click on "Custom Tokens" heading in bold on the left. (If "Custom Tokens" is not bolded, un-check "Show only tokens that are included in the content of this tab" in the far lower left corner of the pop-up window to the left of the "Cancel" button. "Custom Tokens" should now be bold.)
- When prompted, "Custom tokens can be used to further customize the text generated for each volunteer. Would you like to show controls for custom token now?", click "OK".
- Click the "New..." button to create a new token. Be sure to give the token a name with no spaces, similar to other tokens used by MSP. If we want to, we can use the underscore character (_) in place of spaces. This token will be for our Spanish-speaking volunteers to see in the automated reminder email -- in this example, we'll name it "Reminder_Email_Spanish":
After naming the token, click "OK" to close out of the pop-up. - Now, enter the text we want this token to display. For this token, we need to enter the text that we want our Spanish-speaking volunteers to see in the automated reminder email:
- After entering this text, click on "Only show this token for volunteers passing | this filter..." to set up rules for who will see this token. The Edit Filter window will open, and from here we can set up either a ministry-based filter or a service-preference-based filter for our token.
- After following the instructions from either of the articles linked in step 7, we should now see a check mark next to "Only show this token to volunteers passing | this filter..." for our token.
- Repeat steps 5 through 8, this time creating a token called "Reminder_Email_English" containing the text that we want our English-speaking volunteers to see in the automated reminder email and filtering for all of our English-speaking volunteers instead.
- Click "OK" to close out of the Token Options window and be taken back to the Web Terminal pane.
Now, all we need to do is add our custom tokens to the automated reminder email:
- Go to the Web Terminal pane in MSP.
- Click on the "Web Terminal settings…” button. (If you do not see this button, click on the Home tab of the Web Terminal pane -- the "Web Terminal settings…” button will be visible from here.)
- In the Web Terminal settings pop-up window, go to the Auto Reminders section.
- In this section, click on the "Edit Email Body..." button.
- Delete all of the text in this pop-up window except for the "AutoEmailReminderServices" token.
- Use the "Token" menu in this pop-up window to add both of our new custom tokens. When you are finished, the email body should look like this:
If we are concerned that some volunteers might see both tokens, we can refine our filters to ensure that they will only see one.