As a busy church pastor or administrator you will want to communicate with your church by email (as well as perhaps SMS, WhatsApp, or push notifications). Sending from your own email account in your email program is a pain, especially if you are sending to a lot of people! Church Admin allows you to send emails to the whole church, or a particular member type, class, small group or a host of other groups.
The pain point is making sure those emails get through. Your hosting company will limit how many emails your website can send to help limit spam. Gmail will block emails that aren’t authenticated properly.
That’s where signing up to Brevo to work with your Church Admin install is a great move and cheap (or for many free!) to use.
Setting up Brevo email for your website.
Signup at www.brevo.com – click on Start for free
You will need to add your church email address and create a password.
And then confirm your email address.
Once that is done, select the free plan to start off with. You have to scroll down to the bottom, past the paid plans!
Then you need to add your church website domain and do some setting up so Gmail will be happy.
In the top right hand corner of brevo.com, click on your account name, which brings up a menu, and then “Settings.”
Click on Senders, domains, IPS on the left
Click on the add a domain button.
Then type in your domain name, without the “www” and “https://” bits – e.g. churchadminplugin.com
Then you have to authenticate domain by getting some codes add to your host. If you are a techie you can do this yourself, or put a support ticket in with your hosting company or web designer.
The first option gives you the settings, the second gives a link you can give to tech support (phew)!
The settings take 48hrs to go round the internet, so be patient before sending out any emails with Brevo.
The next step is getting the API key to add to Premium Church Admin. Click on the SMTP & API menu item.
Click on API keys
Click on Generate a new API key
Give the API key a name and click generate. Copy the key and click OK.
Back to Church Admin on your website.
Head to the Communications section and use the dropdown menu to go to “Email Settings”
Choose Brevo for both “transactional” and “bulk” email. Make sure the from name and from email are set and then add in your domain name and also the API key and click Save.
At this stage you can send your self a Test email to check all is well. Not to Gmail email addresses, who will reject until the domain propagation is steady after 48hrs.