Church Admin Plugin

Automations

⭐ Premium

The Automations module runs a set of daily email tasks automatically, so you never have to remember to send birthday wishes or anniversary greetings manually. Each automation has its own customisable email template and runs once a day, triggered by the first website visit after 6am.

Finding the screen

Go to Church Admin → Automations. The screen shows all available automations with a green or red indicator next to each one — green means that automation is configured and active, red means it hasn’t been set up yet.

Automations module screen showing available automations with green and red status indicators

Available automations

Birthday and anniversary emails

Five automations handle birthday and anniversary communications. Each is configured separately and can be enabled or disabled independently:

  • Happy Birthday email — sends an email directly to the person celebrating their birthday that day. For children, the email goes to their parents rather than the child.
  • Daily birthdays digest — sends an email to everyone in the directory listing all of that day’s birthdays, so the whole congregation can celebrate together.
  • Happy Anniversary email — sends an email directly to couples celebrating their wedding anniversary that day.
  • Daily anniversaries digest — sends an email to everyone listing all of that day’s wedding anniversaries.
  • Daily birthdays and anniversaries digest — a combined email listing both that day’s birthdays and anniversaries in a single message.

These automations depend on dates of birth and wedding anniversaries being stored in the directory. See Bulk edit dates of birth and Bulk edit anniversaries for how to populate these in bulk.

Custom field automations

Custom field automations send a daily digest email to a nominated contact whenever the value of a specific custom field has changed for any person or household. This is one of the most powerful and flexible features in the Automations module.

A practical example: if you have a custom field called Transport Required, people can update their own entry when their transport needs change. Your transport coordinator receives a daily email listing everyone whose transport requirement changed that day — without having to check the directory manually or wait to hear from people directly. Similar uses include dietary requirements, DBS renewal dates, or any other field that a specific team member needs to be notified about when it changes.

Setting up an automation

Click on any automation from the main screen to open its settings. Each automation has the same set of configuration options:

  • From name — the sender name that appears in the recipient’s inbox
  • From email address — the address the email is sent from
  • Subject line — the email subject
  • Message body — the email content, edited using the WordPress editor with template shortcodes available to personalise it

Save the settings and the status indicator on the main screen will turn green. The automation will run from the following morning.

For the birthday and anniversary automations, each one has its own dedicated setup page. See the Key Dates tutorials for the specific shortcodes and options available for each email type.

How the timing works

Automations are triggered by WordPress Cron — a task scheduler that runs when someone visits your website. The first page visit after 6am each day triggers that day’s automation emails to send.

This means that on days when nobody visits the site before a certain time, the emails may go out later than 6am. For most churches this is fine — a birthday email arriving at 9am is still welcome. If you need more reliable timing, your web host may allow you to set up a server-level cron job to trigger WordPress Cron at a fixed time each day — your hosting support team can advise on this.

Emails are sent according to your Church Admin email settings — either immediately or via the queue. See Setting up email with Church Admin Plugin.

New user email template

The Automations screen also links to the new user email template — the email sent when a WordPress account is created for someone in the directory. This is documented separately. See Registration email settings.

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