I recently received this question from a client running events every week. They wanted to send an introductory email about the sessions without the typical event confirmation email message template info:
I created a smart group for an upcoming study group. Can I use it so new registrants get the introductory email automatically, or is this a manual process?
Smart groups are great when you want to blast the same message at the same time to everyone who matches certain criteria. But what this person really needed was a welcome email that fires off the moment someone registers.
That’s where automation comes in. You’ve got three options:
- Use the out of the box confirmation email wysiwyg editor
- CiviRules with the trigger “Event Participant is added.”
- Or the newer Scheduled Communications extension (still technically in beta, but more flexible than the built-in Scheduled Reminders).
Normally the default confirmation email would be the natural choice, but they wanted a follow-up email and also to use a full HTML template with more design control. It also turns out that event tokens don’t process in this editor either.
So why Scheduled Communications?
- More triggers: unlike Scheduled Reminders, it lets you use register date as the driver—not just event start/end dates or registration start and end.
- Familiar UI: if you’ve used Scheduled Reminders before, the setup will feel almost identical. In fact, it adds the reminder to scheduled reminders admin page.
- Flexibility with SearchKit: start your search with the Participants entity, pull in the contact ID and register date, and you’ve got exactly what you need to set up a reminder.
Here’s the deal:
You can even expand this to other date fields, like relationship start and end dates, activity dates or custom field dates.
Keeping an eye on new extensions and ways of doing things can open up new possibilities as the ecosystem around Search Kit grows. You can enable this under Administration > System Settings > Extensions.