Summary
In this FastTrac video, Dane Whitcomb reviews how to run a Facility RecConnect to send patrons emails related to their reservations.
Video
Transcript
Dane Whitcomb 0:06
In this video, we're going to be going over how to run a Facility Reservation RecConnect. So if you've ran RecConnect In the past, this is going to be pretty similar. Other than that, we're going to be targeting people who have reserved a facility or are going to be reserving a facility. So we're going to start out by going into report output listing in our menu. And in order to find all the rec annex, you can search RecConnect In the report output listing, or at least the beginning of the word, and then it'll show up with everything for RecConnect. And these are by module. So we're going to be looking at the facility RecConnect today. So if we Click on it, and hit Run Report, and for those who haven't ran a RecConnect report before, there's really two steps to it. One is the report piece to see who has reserved the facility for the date range and the facilities are running on. And then second of all, the results of that you can choose to email and target those people.
Dane Whitcomb 1:09
So a couple of use cases of why you might want to run a facility RecConnect, you could send a message out before people reserve so if they've got a reservation for next week, and you want to send something a day before each reservation to them, maybe a reminder about their upcoming reservation, you could use it for that purpose. Maybe after reservations, maybe one day after the reservation ends. If you want to put a you know a survey out there for feedback survey or something like that, you could do that. And then another common one is if you've got some bad weather coming in, and you had to cancel reservations, maybe you want to send a quick RecConnect out to everybody who has a reservation today or reservation tomorrow. Talk them now that it's canceled. So that's the use case I'm gonna be going over today.
Dane Whitcomb 2:02
So in my example, here, I just want to let everyone no who has a reservation today, the date I'm running it, that it's going to be canceled. So I want to look at reservations across all facilities. If you want to just cancel some, you could just pick the facilities that won't be having reservations, and those are the people you want to email. But in my case, I'll just say I want to do everything. So I'm using a facility range of a blank began and ZZ end. And that's just going to know to target all my facilities. And the next key filter here is the reservation date range. So I want to look at any reservation that begins and ends today. Those are the ones I want to cancel. If you are choosing to do some sort of scheduled facility RecConnect, you want to make sure using some sort of variable date value in here like today, begin a month and a month, begin of year. If you use an actual date, and you're getting your scheduling it, it will work for probably that one that first date, but then once you go by it, your schedule reports not going to pick up anything, so just something to keep in mind.
Dane Whitcomb 3:11
So I'm just looking at reservations today. And now I can Click process. And depending on how many facilities and how long your date ranges, they might take a minute to generate. So if you were opting to schedule this report, you would go through the Schedule Button here, I'm just going to run it as we call on demand right now. So just once. So we're going to say I'm actually going to email people this time instead of at a scheduled time. But if you're doing messages that one out about, you know, reminders for Facility Reservation, that might be something you want to schedule there on each day. Once the RecConnect generates, it's going to give this notification like I just saw up here, so you just Click Show results. If you don't get that notification before it disappears, so you can Click on the notifications sidebar and hit show results.
Dane Whitcomb 4:08
In here will be all of the results of the criteria I just selected. So in my system for all facilities, I have two reservations for today. As you can see, only one has an email the other doesn't. So just know if if there's no email tied to the listing in there, they're not going to be able to receive any email. So it might be nice to either get an email from them or just be aware that person's not going to get anything. If you had let's say 10 or 15 records in here and you want to send it to everyone then you don't really need to touch anything in here you can leave the DataGrid with nothing selected as long as your process records are processed options on all records that's gonna include everyone. If you do just want to handpick let's say we just want to do jack doe here. Just selecting him isn't enough here. We also have to switch this the selected record only.
Dane Whitcomb 5:01
So I'm going to say, we're going to send it to everyone. Even though we've only got one valid email in there, most times you probably sending it to everyone, at least in this example of the weather. The next step is you would want to have processed emails on maybe text if you're set up to send out SMS texting messages, email options, so this is where you can put in the subject, so maybe their cancellations, whatever it may be, you can put in a cc email address if you want to include yourself in it just to make sure you got the email. And then what you can do is you can either include an email template if you have one, or you can freeform your email body. So what's nice about the email body is you have these tags here you can use so you could say something like due to inclement weather your reservation so if you want to actually have RecTrac poll in the beginning date of the reservation, you could do see what it is I find it here this there's different parameters we can pull in here.
Dane Whitcomb 6:23
So it's actually going to be Facility Reservation begin of the begin date. So this would actually say due to inclement weather your reservation on September 7, so today's date, it's going to pull on whatever the begin date of the reservation is, and then I could do at and then I could put in the facility description just a way to kind of personalize the email to each customer say has been canceled. So and so just saying your Facility Reservation has been canceled this is actually say you know, your Facility, Reservation on the seventh at the pool has been canceled or whatever it might be. So you can fill this out however you want to. And then if you do need to add attachments again, this example might not make sense, but for others if you want to include a survey or something like that you can do attachments for and then once that's all set how you want it, you would just Click process RecConnect And that's gonna look to send the email out to everyone in this list. So that's just a one example of why you might use the facility RecConnect Like I mentioned, there's others sending surveys out for reservations and reminders about reservations and sure many more use cases you might think of