Communication

An announcement is a post to your whole organization — it lands in the feed of everyone who uses the app, and it sends a push notification. It is the right tool for day-to-day org news: practice changes, game results, reminders, anything that belongs in the feed.

A good announcement:

• Leads with the point. Put the change or the action in the first line — people read announcements on a phone, between other things.
• Says who it is for. If it only affects one group, fan it into that group rather than the whole org, so the rest of the organization is not pinged for nothing.
• Uses urgent and pinned sparingly. Marking everything urgent trains people to ignore urgent. Pin only the handful of posts that should stay at the top.

Announcements reach people inside the app. To reach people who never installed it — parents, donors, board members — use email instead (see below).

Email providers — Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft — do not owe anyone delivery. They decide, per sending domain, whether your mail reaches the inbox, the spam folder, or nowhere. The rules below exist because providers reward senders who behave and quietly punish senders who don’t. Compliance is not bureaucracy — it is the price of the inbox.

The bulk-sender requirements. Gmail and Yahoo introduced a shared set of requirements for bulk senders (historically, senders of roughly 5,000+ messages per day); Microsoft has an equivalent set. They overlap almost entirely:

• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — three DNS records that authenticate your mail, prove it wasn’t tampered with, and stop anyone from forging your “From” address.
• One-click unsubscribe — marketing mail must carry the headers that let a mail client show a native “Unsubscribe” button that works in a single click.
• The spam-complaint-rate ceiling — this is the one with teeth. Keep the rate of recipients clicking “Report spam” below 0.3%, and aim for under 0.1%. Cross 0.3% and a provider can throttle or reject your mail wholesale.

CAN-SPAM essentials. The US law governing commercial email requires accurate “From” and “Reply-To” headers, no deceptive subject lines, a valid physical postal address, and a clear, working opt-out that keeps working and is honored promptly.

Team Scout is nowhere near 5,000 messages a day — but volume is not a shield. The complaint-rate ceiling applies the moment a campaign annoys people, and the authentication records cost nothing and are expected of any marketing sender.

Email law splits mail into two classes, and the distinction is load-bearing:

• Transactional / relationship messages — mail whose primary purpose is to confirm or facilitate a transaction the recipient already entered into: a registration receipt, a ticket confirmation, a payment reminder. These are exempt from the opt-out requirement — you cannot, and should not, let someone unsubscribe from their own receipt.
• Commercial / marketing messages — mail whose primary purpose is to promote: a fundraising appeal, a “come to our game” blast. These get the full set of rules — visible unsubscribe, one-click headers, the org’s identifying information.

The trap: the test is primary purpose. A registration receipt with a paragraph of fundraiser promotion stapled to the bottom can be reclassified as commercial — which means it now needs an unsubscribe link, and worse, it muddies the line. The rule: keep transactional templates strictly transactional. A receipt is a receipt.

Team Scout carries an intent flag on every send and sets it from the email type, not by hand — so an admin cannot accidentally blur the two classes.

The question every email program must answer for every address it holds is: how did we get permission to email this person? It matters for three escalating reasons:

• Deliverability. The fastest way to wreck a sending domain’s reputation is to email people who never asked to hear from you. A purchased or scraped list is reputation poison.
• The law outside the US. Canada’s CASL requires prior consent and a record of it; the EU’s GDPR requires a documented lawful basis. Homeschool networks sometimes include Canadian or border-region families.
• The trap for sports orgs: a registration roster is not a marketing list. A parent gave you their email so their kid could play football. That is consent to send them transactional mail about that registration — not automatic consent to add them to a fundraising blast or an alumni newsletter. Treating a roster as a ready-made marketing list is the single most common honest mistake.

When you create or import a list in Team Scout, the import flow asks where it came from and what kind of consent it carries. A list with unknown provenance is flagged, and the Email Center warns you before allowing a marketing send to it.

“Deliverability” is the discipline of staying in the inbox. Authentication is the entry ticket; hygiene is what keeps the seat:

• Domain warmup. A brand-new sending domain has no reputation. Reputation is built by sending gradually increasing volume to engaged recipients over days and weeks.
• List hygiene. Stop sending to addresses that bounce, and to addresses that never open anything. Dead addresses raise your bounce rate; chronically-disengaged recipients depress the engagement signal providers read as “nobody wants this.”
• Bounce and complaint handling. A hard bounce means the address does not exist — never send there again. A spam complaint means that person actively rejected you — never send them marketing again.

Team Scout handles the hard part for you: once your sending domain is verified, your mail goes out from your organization’s own subdomain so your reputation is isolated (until then, you send from Team Scout’s shared, warmed platform sender), and an automatic suppression list checks every send so the platform structurally cannot keep hammering a dead or hostile address. Your Email Center shows your own bounce and complaint rates with a plain-language Healthy / Watch / At-risk status, so you see trouble coming before a provider acts.

The honest summary: Team Scout’s email is compliant by design, not by afterthought. The hard compliance machinery is already specified or shipped:

• Per-tenant sending subdomains ship with correct SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Once yours is verified, your reputation is isolated — a noisy neighbor cannot poison your inbox placement.
• One-click and visible unsubscribe are injected into every marketing send; transactional sends correctly carry neither.
• Automatic suppression — an address that hard-bounces repeatedly or files a spam complaint is suppressed, and the send path checks suppression before every send.
• The transactional/marketing intent split is load-bearing — receipts are kept strictly transactional, and the class is set by the system, not chosen by hand.

This is a credential worth saying out loud: we send your email the right way, and we’ll show you exactly who got it.