Volunteer Not Receiving Email

Question:

I sent an email to a volunteer using CERVIS but they have not received it. How can I fix this?

Answer:

Please follow the steps below to troubleshoot email receipt problems:

• Verify with the volunteer that you have the correct email address. Many times a volunteer will change email addresses and not notify your organization or update their profile. If the volunteer has not changed their address recently, verify that it is spelled correctly in the system.

• Check the volunteer's status in their CERVIS profile. If their status is set to "Inactive", the system will not send emails to their address, even if it is specifically added as an email recipient. This can be done by following the steps below:

  1. Login to your CERVIS account.
  2. Click on the "Search/Manage Volunteer Database" link under the "Volunteer Management" section of the Main Dashboard.
  3. Enter the volunteer's last name into the search field and click the "Search Volunteer Database" button.
  4. Once the search results are displayed, click on the "Update Volunteer" button ().
  5. Scroll down toward the bottom of the page and check the value of the "Volunteer Status" field. If this field is set to "Inactive" the system will not attempt to send email to their address.

• Have the volunteer check their spam or junk email folder. Depending on how the volunteer has their email account set up, your email messages might be getting flagged as spam or junk mail and not being delivered to their mailbox. Have the user add your organization's email address to their contact or safe senders list and try again. If you are having a large number of volunteers reporting that your messages are being flagged as spam or are not being received at all, please reference the knowledge base article here: Email Deliverability and Spam Control

• Check in CERVIS to see if the email is being returned as "undeliverable" by the volunteer's email system. 

  1. Login to your CERVIS account.
  2. Click on the "Search/Manage Volunteer Database" link under the "Volunteer Management" section of the Main Dashboard.
  3. Enter the volunteer's last name into the search field and click the "Search Volunteer Database" button.
  4. Once the search results are displayed, click on the "Update Volunteer" button ().
  5. Scroll down toward the middle of the page and check the value of the "Volunteer E-mail Subscription Status" field. If this field is set to "Failed" the system will not attempt to send email to their address.

• If the person who is not able to receive email messages from CERVIS is a part of your organization and has an email address on the same domain as the email address being used by CERVIS to send emails, please reference the knowledge base article here: Organization Personnel Not Receiving Email