Internal
Internal is where you communicate with your own team - as opposed to External, which is for your outward-facing social presence. Open it from the Internal tab at the top of HIVE.
The Internal dashboard is a set of cards, each one a tool. Each has its own guide:
Who can do what
Section titled “Who can do what”- Using the tools - creating newsletters, surveys, and documents, and posting announcements - is an Editor capability (including admins who also edit). Other roles can view.
- Managing contacts and contact groups (below) is an Admin capability. Anyone on your team can see them, and anyone who can send can pick them as recipients.
Contacts - your internal recipients
Section titled “Contacts - your internal recipients”Newsletters, surveys, document shares, press releases and crisis protocols all let you pick recipients from the same place: your contacts. They live in Settings → Contacts, not the Internal tab. Your contacts are also the people you can ask to approve a social post or a crisis protocol, and they don’t need a HIVE login to do it.
Anyone on your team can open Settings → Contacts and read the list; an admin keeps it up to date. Everyone on it is a possible recipient, so keeping it current is what makes sure the right people receive your internal communications.
Adding a contact
Section titled “Adding a contact”Choose Add Contact. Only Full Name and Email Address are required, and they’re the two fields marked with a red asterisk. Department and Job Title are optional; leave them blank and the table shows a dash in their place. Choose Save Contact to add them. To change someone later, use the edit button on their row and choose Update Contact.
HIVE checks the email address when you save. It needs exactly one @ with something on each side, no spaces, and no more than 255 characters; otherwise the save is refused with “Enter a valid email address” or “Email address is too long (255 characters at most)”. Anything that passes is accepted, including addresses with a + tag or letters such as å and ö. Addresses are matched exactly as typed, so anna@acme.com and Anna@acme.com count as two different contacts.
An address can belong to only one contact, so adding one that’s already on the list is refused with “A contact with this email already exists”. If the address belonged to someone you removed, HIVE brings that contact back instead, with the details you just entered: “Contact restored. This email belonged to a removed contact, so their earlier record is back.”
Importing contacts from a CSV file
Section titled “Importing contacts from a CSV file”Choose Import CSV, pick a .csv file, then choose Upload. The file needs a header row naming its columns:
| Column | Required | Header names HIVE reads |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Yes | name |
| Yes | email | |
| Department | No | department, dept or team |
| Job title | No | job_role, job_title, role or title |
As the dialog says, “Header names are not case-sensitive.” Spaces and hyphens in a header count as underscores too, so Job Title and Job-Role both work. Name and email have no other spellings: a header such as Full Name or Email Address isn’t recognised, and every row then fails for a missing name or email. Columns HIVE doesn’t read are ignored.
When a file has more than one column for the department or the job title, the one listed first in the table wins. An empty cell never wins, though, so a row with a blank Job Title takes its job title from a Title column if there is one - and in some address book exports that column holds Mr, Ms or Dr.
Each row is checked on its own, and a row that fails is skipped while the rest import. A row fails when:
- its name or email is missing (“Name is required”, “Email is required” or “Name and email are required”, which is also what a blank line in the file shows)
- its email address isn’t usable (“Enter a valid email address”) or is too long (“Email address is too long (255 characters at most)”), by the same rule as adding a contact
- its email address already belongs to a contact, including one added by an earlier row of the same file (“A contact with this email already exists”)
A row whose address belonged to someone you removed brings that contact back with the row’s details, and counts as successful.
When the upload finishes, HIVE shows how many rows were Successful and how many Failed, and lists every failed row under Errors with its row number, its email address if it has one, and the reason - for example Row 7 (anna@acme.com). Rows are numbered the way a spreadsheet numbers them: the header is row 1, so your first contact is row 2. If HIVE refuses the whole file instead, for example because it has no rows (“CSV file is empty”), you see that reason in red and nothing is imported.
Removing a contact
Section titled “Removing a contact”Use the bin on the contact’s row. HIVE asks you to confirm, naming the person: “They will no longer appear in any recipient list. Adding the same email address again restores them.” Choose Remove to go ahead.
Removing a contact does more than take them off the list:
- They drop out of every recipient list and every contact group, so nothing new can be sent to them.
- Every link they hold stops working, at once and for good. That covers their crisis protocol links, as a Final Approver or a cc recipient, on protocols in any state - so a cc recipient loses access to an approved protocol too - and their post approval links. Opening one shows that the link isn’t valid, without saying why.
- Decisions they already made stand. A post or protocol they approved stays approved.
- Adding the same address again brings the contact back, and the groups they were in, but none of their links. If they need a link again, send them a new one.
For what this means for a waiting post or protocol, see Removing an approver from Contacts and When someone is removed from Contacts.
Contact groups
Section titled “Contact groups”The Contact groups card sits above the contacts table in Settings → Contacts: “Save a set of contacts under one name, then pick the whole group wherever you choose recipients.”
- Admins choose New group, enter a Group name, tick the contacts to include and choose Create group. The dialog has a search box, a department filter and Select all shown, which ticks everything the search and filter leave on screen. Use the edit button on a group’s row to rename it or change who’s in it (Save group), and the bin to delete it.
- Everyone else sees the list with “Only admins can create or change groups.”, and can still pick groups when they send.
- A group name can be up to 100 characters and can’t match another group’s name, whatever the capitals (“A group with this name already exists.”). A group holds up to 1,000 contacts.
- Each group shows how many contacts are in it. Removing a contact takes them out of every group; a group whose contacts have all been removed stays on the list as No contacts, so an admin can see it and delete it.
A group is a shortcut, not a live audience. Picking one adds the people in it at that moment as individual recipients, so changing the group later - or deleting it - never touches a send, an approval request or a protocol already made. Deleting a group removes no contacts; as the confirmation puts it, “nothing already sent is affected.”
A change you make to your contacts or groups shows up in recipient lists straight away. A change a colleague makes appears once you reload the page.
Picking recipients
Section titled “Picking recipients”Wherever you choose people - the newsletter and press release composers, the share dialogs for documents, newsletters and surveys, a crisis protocol’s approvers and cc recipients, and Send for approval on a social post - you use the same picker. One search box (“Search contacts and groups…”) looks through groups by name and contacts by name, email, department and job title. Groups are listed first, each as one line with its name and how many people are in it, such as Board members · 6.
A picked group stays one line in your selection. Expand it to untick individual members, and the line then reads, for example, Board members · 5 of 6. Someone you pick twice, on their own and through a group, is still only sent one copy. Most lists also offer Select All Contacts. Each tool’s guide covers what’s different there: Newsletters, Surveys, Document hub, Crisis Response and Social publishing.
Who HIVE’s emails come from
Section titled “Who HIVE’s emails come from”When HIVE sends on your behalf, it uses two addresses of its own, and which one you get depends on what the email is:
| Address | What goes out from it |
|---|---|
mail.hivecomms.app | Sign-in codes, account setup and password reset links, card notifications, support ticket emails, crisis communications, and post approval emails. |
updates.hivecomms.app | Newsletters, surveys, document shares, and press releases. |
They’re kept apart on purpose. How well an address reaches inboxes depends on how people treat the mail already coming from it, so a newsletter someone marks as spam shouldn’t be able to stop a colleague’s sign-in code arriving. Splitting the two means it can’t.
When HIVE sends them, crisis communications go out from mail.hivecomms.app, not the updates address, for exactly that reason - a crisis email has to arrive, and it shouldn’t share a reputation with your marketing.
Sending from your own domain instead
Section titled “Sending from your own domain instead”The two HIVE addresses only cover mail HIVE sends for you. You still verify one subdomain, such as send.acme.com, and it’s still per category: only the categories an admin switches over in Settings → Email leave from your domain, and everything else keeps coming from HIVE. Post approval emails are one of those categories, listed as Post approval requests, and like the rest they start on Sends from HIVE. Mail routed to your domain doesn’t touch either HIVE address, so there’s no second domain to verify. Verifying the subdomain does mean adding the DNS records HIVE shows you, including an SPF record, on that subdomain only - your company-wide SPF and DMARC records stay exactly as they are.
Account setup and password reset links always come from HIVE, whatever your routing says. They’re the only way someone can get a credential in the first place, so HIVE won’t let a sender misconfiguration lock your team out.
Unsubscribes
Section titled “Unsubscribes”Newsletters, surveys, document shares and press releases carry an unsubscribe link at the bottom, reading “Don’t want to receive these emails? Unsubscribe.” It’s the same on mail sent from HIVE’s address and from your own domain.
The page it opens offers two choices: stop just that kind of email, or stop all marketing and updates from your company.
What it means when you send:
- A recipient who has unsubscribed is skipped, and usually you aren’t told. A newsletter still reports as sent, and a document share still reports as shared, so the number of people who actually received it can be lower than the number you selected. A press release says so in one case only: if it reached nobody at all, you get “Press release saved but no emails were delivered.”
- A survey is the exception. If every recipient you picked has unsubscribed, the send is refused with “This recipient has unsubscribed from these emails and was not contacted.”
- The Sent figure in Analytics counts them anyway, because it counts every send HIVE recorded - including the ones it refused to make. An unsubscribed recipient therefore lifts Sent without lifting Delivered. See Analytics.
Crisis communications are excluded from all of this. They carry no unsubscribe link, nobody can opt out of them, and the unsubscribe page says so plainly: “Neither choice stops urgent crisis communications.” Your control over who receives them is the recipient list itself. Post approval emails are the same: they carry no unsubscribe link, and nobody can opt out of them.