Tech Forum

I would like to have the ability to send an email to all ward-level members in a given organization, such as all Relief Society presidents or presidencies in each Ward in my Stake. This would be a helpful tool for the Stake Relief Society presidency to have (and the other auxiliary heads), rather than having to continuously update an email list for their ward-level counterparts.

I have been unable to find such functionality in the lds.org directory. Does anyone know if this feature is available or planned?

Thanks.

Try the "Send a Message" feature under Clerk Tools (assuming you have access to it). It lets you broadcast to certain ward level presidencies, but as I recall, it misses a couple key positions that would be nice.

Thank you for pointing this out. I could indeed email all Ward-level Relief Society presidencies through the Clerk Tools. As a note, while this can be done for RS, this feature is not available for emailing the YM or YW.

My goal however, is to allow the Stake Auxiliary heads to be able to email their Ward counterparts without having to go through me. The current way they do this is to create a custom email list, and then to update the list periodically as changes are made at the Ward level. I am hoping for a more streamlined tool using the directory on lds.org. My hunch is that this feature is currently unavailable, but I wanted to check here to make sure I wasn't missing something.

The capability you describe is not yet available for someone like the Stake Relief Society President or any other stake auxiliary presidency. There are, however, defined e-mail groups available to the stake presidency and the stake clerk beyond those available to the general membership. I do not know what those predefined groups are.

For now you can still use the LDS.org directory to accomplish the task of sending a message to predefined groups in each ward. It is not a single step. To do so, first compose the message offline. Then, using the LDS.org directory, select a ward in the top of the left column, then "Ward Organizations" in that column. Next, select a predefined group in the middle "Filter Results" column. Finally, click the "Email all <group name>" in the top right column. Your computer's e-mail client will be opened with the group e-mail addresses in the Bcc (blind carbon copy) field. Paste in the message, and send it. You will have to do this for each ward/branch within your stake.

The same procedure is used to send a message to predefined group presidencies. Just select "Ward Leaders" instead of "Ward Organizations".

jdlessley wrote:The capability you describe is not yet available for someone like the Stake Relief Society President or any other stake auxiliary presidency.

Does this mean that such functionality is planned?

I cannot speak on any plans. This has been intimated in other posts by Church employees when they stated that the e-mail capabilities have not been fully developed.

A problem that has to be overcome for such large e-mail lists is the spam filtering used by ISPs and e-mail clients. When the number of addressees is large the message may be blocked as spam.

caj36 wrote: The current way they do this is to create a custom email list, and then to update the list periodically as changes are made at the Ward level.

While an admirable goal, one person on the stake level updating and changing a custom list, outside of LDS.org, would find such a task quickly overwhelming.

kisaac wrote:While an admirable goal, one person on the stake level updating and changing a custom list, outside of LDS.org, would find such a task quickly overwhelming.

Although it's a hassle, it's hardly overwhelming. I do precisely that for our stake, and it takes less than a half hour a week (sometimes more, but usually less) to keep it up to date. I'd prefer that everyone would have their correct email addresses on lds.org, and all be visible, and that ward clerks kept everything up to date, and that the email features on lds.org gave us all the flexibility and access we need. But they don't, so we keep another list on the side, which we find invaluable while we wait for the technology to catch up.

kisaac wrote:While an admirable goal, one person on the stake level updating and changing a custom list, outside of LDS.org, would find such a task quickly overwhelming.

to rephrase: I find it quickly overwhelming, and I do it as well, but for a small subset of leaders. I know I couldn't keep on top of every stake aux presidency and the ward level callings.

jdlessley wrote:The capability you describe is not yet available for someone like the Stake Relief Society President or any other stake auxiliary presidency. There are, however, defined e-mail groups available to the stake presidency and the stake clerk beyond those available to the general membership. I do not know what those predefined groups are.

For now you can still use the LDS.org directory to accomplish the task of sending a message to predefined groups in each ward. It is not a single step. To do so, first compose the message offline. Then, using the LDS.org directory, select a ward in the top of the left column, then "Ward Organizations" in that column. Next, select a predefined group in the middle "Filter Results" column. Finally, click the "Email all <group name>" in the top right column. Your computer's e-mail client will be opened with the group e-mail addresses in the Bcc (blind carbon copy) field. Paste in the message, and send it. You will have to do this for each ward/branch within your stake.

The same procedure is used to send a message to predefined group presidencies. Just select "Ward Leaders" instead of "Ward Organizations".

Noticed today when RS sends an email using the "Email All Relief Society" that it pulls the email from Head of Household - which may or may not belong to the intended person. That by design or what looks to me like a bug.