Overview of NetCommunity email

I couldn't find something as concise as this in the Blackbaud documentation, so I've written it myself.

There are four types of emails from BBNC:

• Acknowledgements - these get sent when the user does something, like give a gift, or register as a user.
• "Messages" - these are emails sent on an ad hoc basis to a list of people. The list can be based on emails in RE, or from an imported list, or all people registered on BBNC. (At the moment the only people registered are those who are using the BBNC backend.) When people get these and click on the "email preferences" link they get the option to opt in and out of newsletters (see below) or out of all communications, so these shouldn't be used for anything regular, instead...
• Newsletters - these are designed to be sent regularly. People opt in to get these specifically on the website. They can also opt out.
  
• Campaigns - these are a series of appeals, each of which consists of a message sent to a number of lists. It allows A/B testing, test messages before the real thing goes, and other marketing goodies.
  

Behind the scenes there are also templates. 

A template does as you'd expect, lets you define the general look of your emails, whilst changing the content for each message that goes out.

The template can be based on a given list, or if you select "constituent" for who the template goes to, you can specify the list of people it is sent to when you create the message based on the template.