Sending an email to all the members of your sports club
The secretary opens his personal mailbox, pastes a hundred and forty addresses into the bcc line and hits send. Some of it arrives, some of it lands in spam, and three people write back asking to be taken off. Next round they are still on the list, because that list lives in a spreadsheet from last season.
Why that bcc email won't hold up
An email to all the members of your sports club is one of those jobs that half works for years. It reaches enough people that nobody raises the alarm, and it fails for exactly the people who needed the message most. There are three problems in it, and none of the three is solved by better addresses.
The first is delivery. An ordinary personal mailbox is built for post to one or two people at a time. The moment you drop a hundred and forty addresses into it, the receiving end sees something that looks a lot like a mass mailing, sent from an address that is known nowhere as a sender of mass mail. The message then doesn't bounce with an error — that you would notice. It quietly disappears into the spam folder of some of your members, and you only hear about it when somebody says a month later that they never get anything from the club.
The second is the address line itself. Bcc goes wrong once. Somebody pastes the list into the wrong field, or hits reply-all, and the email addresses of your entire membership are out there — including those of the parents of under-age players. That cannot be undone: sent is sent. And what a club keeps on file and who it shares that with is not a free choice either; that is the subject of which member data a club keeps.
The third is unsubscribing. Anyone not given a decent way off your list uses the button that is there: report as spam. A handful of those reports costs the reputation of the address you send from, and after that the message about the closed hall doesn't arrive either.
Where it sits in Koach
In Koach you write and send club email from the club area. You open it through your profile and the entry Club dashboard; the Email section sits inside. If you don't see that entry, you don't have the rights: club email belongs to the club administrator and the board roles, not to every coach. That is deliberate. A message that lands with the entire membership belongs behind the same door as the member list itself.
At the top of the screen sit a few fields you fill in once. Sender name is what a member sees as the sender in their inbox; leave it empty and your club's name goes there. Reply to is the address a reply arrives at — usually the board or secretary address. That field does more work than it looks, because a club email is exactly the kind of message people reply to. Next to it are Address, the part before the @ of the address you send from, and Signature, a fixed sign-off that goes under every message.
One condition comes before everything else: nothing goes out until the club's own email domain is connected and verified. The mail comes from your own address, not from Koach — with your own sender reputation. Until that is done the screen shows no send button but a note that you have to connect the domain first. That is a one-off job for the administrator and a story of its own.
Six ways to choose your recipients
The Send button opens the composer. At the top sits one picker: To. That is where you choose who gets this message. It holds five fixed audiences and, below them, your own groups.
- All club members — everybody attached to a team in the club: the coaches who run a team and all the players, parents and assistant coaches in those teams.
- Players only — the players. Parents are deliberately outside this one: a message to the players is a different message from one to the parents, even when it is about the same match day.
- Junior players only — players who are under 18 today and have an account of their own. Two caveats the app puts there as well: younger players often have no account, and anybody without a date of birth in their profile counts as an adult. For a message that has to be read at home, parents is usually the better choice.
- Parents only — everybody linked as a parent to a player in a team. This is the audience for everything that has to be arranged at home and that a junior player can do nothing with.
- Coaches only — the coaches and assistant coaches of every team. This is the audience for the technical meeting, the hall schedule and the question of who is walking around with the key.
- One of your own groups — at the bottom of the list sit the groups you created under Organisation, each with its own name. A group is a hand-picked set of people: the audit committee, the referee mentors, the volunteers for the annual tournament. Once the group exists, it is one tap away every time.
That last form is the answer to the spreadsheet. A group you fill properly once stays right as long as you maintain it — and it never has to be copied across to an email program by hand, because it already lives with the people themselves.
What you see before you send
Under the subject field and the message field appears a line most clubs learn about too late: how many of your chosen recipients actually have an email address. It says something like 18 of 30 recipients have an email address, with a note underneath that members without a Koach account have no address and so will get nothing.
That is not a technical detail but the most important sentence on the screen. A group of thirty of whom eighteen are reachable is not an email to thirty people. If you see a gap like that you have two choices: send anyway and know that twelve people will have to hear it another way, or first make sure those twelve have an account. The second is the durable answer and it goes faster than you think with an invitation link per player.
Press send after that and the app asks for confirmation once more with the number in it: Send this message to 18 recipients? Next to that button there is only cancel, so a mistaken tap costs you your draft at worst. And if there is nobody with an address in your selection, nothing goes out — the app says so, instead of reporting an empty send.
There is one limit: a maximum of 500 messages go out per send. If your selection is bigger, the app refuses and asks you to split the recipients into groups and send per group. That sounds like a restriction and it is one, but the reason is worth it: a send that breaks off halfway leaves nobody knowing who did and didn't get the message, and then sending it all again is the only way out.
In short: read the count before you send, not the confirmation afterwards. The gap between the number of recipients and the number of addresses is exactly the group you have to reach another way.
Everybody gets their own message
This is where club email works fundamentally differently from a message out of your own mailbox. There is no shared address line. Every member gets their own message, with only their own address in it. Not in bcc — there is no list. Whoever opens the email sees the club's name as the sender and nothing at all about who else got it.
That is not a tidy side effect but the whole reason it is built this way. One shared address line shows the email addresses of every member to every member in a single click, and those of the parents of under-age players to everyone on the list. A mistake like that is not repaired with an apology email.
Two things get quietly sorted out along the way. If somebody is in your selection twice — as a parent and as a coach, say, with the same address — they get one message and not two. And if somebody sits in a group without a linked account, they count as somebody without an address instead of tripping up the entire send.
At the bottom of every message sit two lines: that the recipient is getting this email because they are a member of your club, and an unsubscribe link. That link really works. Anyone who clicks it is off your club's mail immediately and sees that confirmed on a page where they can sign back up with one tap if they clicked by accident. Large email programs recognise that unsubscribe option and put their own unsubscribe button at the top of the message — precisely the button people press instead of reporting spam.
Anyone who unsubscribes drops out of your club's later sends. Their notifications in the app don't change, and neither does mail from another club they belong to. For the board it means one thing: you no longer have to keep unsubscribe requests by hand in a spreadsheet, because the club cannot write to those people by accident any more.
What survives every send
Under the composer sits Previously sent: the club's last twenty-five sends, with the subject, the date and the outcome — how many recipients the message went to, and how many were skipped because they had no address.
That list does three things at once. It answers the question of whether something has already been communicated, without anybody digging through their sent items. It makes handover possible: a new secretary sees what went out last, instead of starting from nothing in a predecessor's mailbox. And it makes reach visible over time — if every send shows a sizeable number of skipped recipients, that is not an email problem but a membership records problem.
Email, announcement or team message?
Club email is not the only channel, and it is rarely the fastest. Three forms, three purposes:
- Email for what has to be read and kept outside the app: the invitation to the members' meeting, the letter about the fees, the message to parents that has to end up in a folder somewhere.
- A club announcement for what has to be on every member's screen today: the hall is closed, the tournament is off. That lands in the app itself and gets in faster than post.
- A team message or poll for anything that concerns one team. That includes the answer: who is coming, who is driving. How those messages arrive on a phone is in push notifications for team messages.
The practical rule: if somebody has to be able to find it again, it is email. If it has to be seen today, it is an announcement. And if it is about one team, it doesn't belong with the whole membership.
Frequently asked questions
Can I recall or edit a club email after sending it?
No. Once the message is gone it sits in your members' mailboxes and there is no button to pull it back. You repair a mistake with a second, short message to the same selection. The first send simply stays in Previously sent, so you can see later what went out that day.
What happens if a send fails halfway through?
The app reports how many messages really went out, and the send appears in Previously sent with that number. What you don't see is which people did and didn't get it: the list counts, it doesn't name names. So don't blindly send to everybody again — with a large or uncertain send, pick smaller groups one after another instead.
Somebody unsubscribed by accident. Can I put them back on?
Not from the club area. Only the person themselves can sign back up, through the page they saw after clicking the unsubscribe link or through the link under an older club email. That is deliberate: a club that can put somebody back on the list is not offering a real unsubscribe. Meanwhile their notifications in the app and the messages from their own team keep working as normal.
Can I attach a file, a PDF for instance?
No, club email sends text only; there is no field for attachments. Put a link in your message to the document instead, on the club website or in a shared folder. That helps at the receiving end too: an email with a large attachment from a young sender address lands in the spam folder sooner.
