Assemble's built-in Messaging Centre helps to keep all communication between your organisation and its volunteers in one place. It is an internal messaging system rather than full email.

Nevertheless, it has many of the usual functionalities of an emailing system with the advantage of enabling communication without personal email addresses displaying.

Open the new message screen

Select a message to reveal the all actions menu.

The permission held by your role controls this feature like any other in Assemble; your organisation sets these permissions; please contact them if you have any enquiry related to yours.

To open Assemble's internal message system:

Click the envelope icon available from any page in Assemble.
Click New Message to open the compose message window at the bottom right of the page you're on.
You can also click Compose new in the message centre to open the compose message screen there.

🤓 Tip: Click See all in message centre at the bottom of the dropdown to access your inbox, or select any of your recent messages to open it.

Compose a new message

To compose a message, first open it by following the steps above.

To add message recipients, start typing the person’s name in the To field.
- This will open an incremental search list.
Select the relevant name from the dropdown list to add them as a recipient.
- You can only access users within your team unless you have a higher permission level.
To add recipients to other fields, click the Cc or Bcc fields and enter their names there.
- You do not need to use Bcc to hide email addresses, as Assemble’s internal messaging does not display email addresses. However, recipient names will be visible.
- If there are many recipients, it is recommended to use Bcc to reduce on-screen clutter from long recipient lists.
Click above the To, Cc, and Bcc fields to access advanced search.
In advanced search, add individual recipients, users with Assemble access, or external email addresses.
If you have the correct permissions, you can also send bulk messages to:
- People
- Teams
- Roles
- External email addresses

Send a message to an external email address

It's possible to send an email from Assemble to someone who doesn't have an active Assemble account, such as an applicant.

To reveal the advanced search, click above To, Cc, and Bcc, and select the external option from the drop-down.
To add message recipients, start typing the person's email in the To field. When typing in the person’s email, Assemble will suggest some of the most used email domains.

📌 Note: You need to select external email addresses from the dropdown to save them.

Save a message

Your message automatically saves every 15 seconds. You can find your saved message in the Drafts folder.

Add as a touchpoint

You can add a message to the recipient's touchpoint timeline.
You can add a message to the volunteer's record when you're sending the message.
However, you can also do this after you've sent the message as well as to messages received from volunteers in your Message Centre.

Open the relevant message.
Click the More option in the message window.
Select Add as touchpoint. This option isn't available if you've already saved the message to the user's record.

📌 Note: You can't delete a touchpoint that was added to the timeline in this way.

Block users

To block users, click the More tab on a message received from the user you want to block and select the block/unblock option from the drop-down.

You will need to have permission Can block in order to block users. The user you want to block needs to have the allow to be blocked permission enabled.

You can't email users you've blocked, nor can they message you.

📌 Note: It's standard practice only to allow volunteers to block others or be blocked themselves. Volunteer managers should always be able to communicate with their volunteers but the organisation's Assemble administrators control the permissions for different users.