Newsletters

Newsletters let you write an internal update and send it by email to your team - composed in HIVE, delivered to the people you pick from your contacts.

Who can do what

Composing, sending, and managing newsletters is an Editor capability (including admins who also edit). Managing your contacts and contact groups in Settings → Contacts is an Admin task - see the Internal overview. Viewing the history is open to your team.

Compose and send

1. On the Internal dashboard, open Newsletter Builder and choose Compose. The Compose Newsletter editor opens.

2. Build the content from blocks: a text block (rich text), an image, an image beside text (image-left / image-right), a hero heading, and a divider. Drag blocks to reorder them, and set the branded header and footer under Customize Template Branding (name, tagline, colours) - these are remembered for next time, see Your branding is remembered. Images you add are embedded and hosted as part of the newsletter - they’re not file attachments.

3. Add a Subject Line.

4. Pick your recipients under Select Contacts with Add contacts to audience… - search for people or contact groups, use Select All Contacts, or Clear Selection to start over. See Choosing recipients.

5. Check it with View Preview (and Edit Message to go back), then either Save Draft or Send Newsletter.

You’ll see Newsletter Sent when it goes out, or Draft Saved when you save one for later.

Note

Save Draft still needs a Subject Line - without one, HIVE asks you to “Please enter a subject to save this as a draft.” It also needs at least one recipient picked: with nobody selected, it fails with Failed to save and “Select at least one contact”. Send Newsletter needs the whole thing ready: if something’s missing or no one is selected, you’ll see “Please fill all fields and select at least one contact before sending.”

Choosing recipients

Newsletters go to your contacts - the people an admin keeps in Settings → Contacts. You can pick them one by one, or a whole contact group at a time from the groups an admin has set up there. See the Internal overview for how your contacts work.

Open Add contacts to audience… for one list that holds both, groups first. Type in Search contacts and groups… to narrow it: contacts match on name, email, department or job title, and groups on their name. The list stays open while you pick, so you can choose several people and groups in one go. Click outside it or press Escape to close it.

• A contact shows as their name, with their department in brackets when they have one. Picking them adds a chip with their name; the X on the chip removes them.
• A group shows as one line with its name and how many members it has, for example “Board members · 12”. Picking it adds the members it has when you pick it, as one line under the picker. Expand that line with its arrow to untick anyone you want to leave out, and it then reads, for example, “Board members · 11 of 12”. The X on the line removes the whole group. A group with no members is listed but can’t be picked.
• Select All Contacts replaces whatever you’ve picked with every contact, one by one, and drops any groups you’d picked. Clear Selection empties your selection. Both are hidden while you’re searching.

Someone who is already covered - picked themselves, or in a group you’ve picked - shows a tick, and picking them again does nothing. A person in two picked groups, or in a group and also picked on their own, gets the newsletter once, and the line under the picker, such as “12 contacts selected to receive this newsletter.”, counts each person once.

A group is copied when you pick it

Picking a group adds the people in it at that point. If an admin changes the group or deletes it afterwards, the recipients you’ve already picked stay as they are. Nothing about the group is stored on the newsletter - each member simply receives it like any contact you picked yourself.

While your contacts are loading, the list shows “Loading contacts…”. If you have no contacts yet, it says “No contacts yet. Add them under Settings > Contacts.” If they can’t be loaded, it says “Contacts could not be loaded.” with a Try again button, rather than showing an empty list.

Your branding is remembered

Open Customize Template Branding in the composer to set the header and footer name and tagline, their background and text colours, and the heading and body text colours used in the newsletter itself.

You only have to set these once. When you send a newsletter or save it as a draft, the branding is saved as your company’s default, and the next newsletter starts from it. Change it later and the new values become the default from then on.

These settings are shared

Branding is saved for your whole company, not just for you. If a colleague composes the next newsletter, they’ll see the branding you set. It isn’t a personal preference.

Two controls sit with the branding settings:

• Save these as the company default - ticked by default. Untick it if you’re making a one-off change for this newsletter only and don’t want it to stick. It goes back to ticked for your next newsletter.
• Reset to HIVE default - puts every branding field back to HIVE’s own colours and wording. Like any other change, it becomes the company default once you send or save.

Saving the branding is the last thing HIVE does, after the newsletter itself has gone out, so it can’t hold up a send. If it doesn’t stick you’ll see Branding not saved - the newsletter was sent as normal, and setting the branding again on your next one saves it.

Newsletters you’ve already sent are unaffected. Each one keeps the look it had when it went out, so changing your branding never rewrites your history.

Note

If you open the composer and the branding section is still loading, give it a moment before sending. HIVE won’t send until your company’s branding has loaded, so a newsletter can’t go out in the wrong colours.

If your branding can’t be loaded at all, the preview and Customize Template Branding say “Your company branding could not be loaded.” with a Try again button. Send Newsletter and Save Draft are refused until it loads, with Branding could not be loaded and “Nothing was sent. Your company branding is being loaded again. Try again in a moment.” (“Nothing was saved.” for a draft). HIVE tries again for you, so after a moment you can send as normal.

Newsletter History

Everything you send or save is logged in Newsletter History (open it from the Newsletter Builder card). Each entry shows its subject, a status badge - published or draft - when it was sent, and how many people it went to. For any entry you can:

• View - open a preview of the newsletter.
• Share - send it to more people without rebuilding it. Pick from your contacts and contact groups, type outside addresses, or both - see Sharing a newsletter.
• Delete - remove the record from the history. This clears it from HIVE; it doesn’t unsend an email that already went out.

Sharing a newsletter

Share opens Share Newsletter Via Email, which has two places to put people. HIVE sends to both:

• Recipients - open Add contact email… to pick contacts and contact groups from one searchable list, the same way as in the composer (see Choosing recipients). Only contacts with an email address are listed here. A group member without one is left out, and the group’s line says so, for example “1 member has no email address and is left out.”
• External Email Addresses - type addresses outside your contacts, as the field says: “Addresses outside your contacts, separated by commas or semicolons.” Select All Contacts only ever changes the contacts you’ve picked, so anything you’ve typed here stays.

Under the field, a line counts who will receive it, such as “5 recipients”. Each address is counted and emailed once: the same address typed twice, typed in different capitals, or typed and also belonging to a picked contact gets one email.

Type plain addresses only. If an entry can’t be an email address - it has no @, or has a space in it, such as a name before the address - the line names it instead, for example ""dana.reed” is not an email address. Correct it or remove it.”, and choosing Share Newsletter shows Check the recipients and sends nothing until you fix it. With nobody picked and nothing typed, you’ll see “Please enter at least one recipient email address.”

How newsletters are delivered

Newsletters are sent through HIVE’s own email service - there’s no email setup to do. They go out from HIVE’s updates address, updates.hivecomms.app, which HIVE keeps separate from the address your sign-in codes and account emails come from. See Who HIVE’s emails come from.

Note

Optionally, an admin can send newsletters from your company’s own domain instead, set up under Settings → Email. That’s an optional admin step - by default, newsletters send through HIVE with nothing to configure.

One thing to know about your recipient list: anyone who has unsubscribed is skipped, and the send still reports as completed. HIVE doesn’t tell you who was left out, so the number you sent to can be lower than the number of people on your list. See Unsubscribes.

The same goes for a contact an admin removes from Settings → Contacts after you picked them: they aren’t emailed, and the Newsletter Sent message still counts them. If everyone you picked has been removed, the send fails with “None of the selected contacts could be found. They may have been removed.”

Good to know

• There’s no limit on how many recipients a newsletter can go to - it can go to every one of your contacts.
• Newsletters go to your contacts, which an admin manages in Settings → Contacts. See the Internal overview for how your contacts work.