Communications overview and channel setup

Communications brings audience selection and outbound history together, but its components serve different jobs:

• Overview — a quick composer for a one-off broadcast.
• Campaigns — saved single-channel broadcasts that can send now or later. Overview's All channels option creates a separate Campaign for each selected channel.
• Newsletters — designed email publications.
• Automations — triggered sequences containing wait and send steps.
• Templates and WhatsApp — reusable copy and approved Meta templates.
• Segments — reusable audience rules.
• Inbox — inbound email, SMS and WhatsApp conversations and same-channel replies.
• Message log — recent outbound rows sent through the queued messages pipeline, filterable by channel; it is not a complete log of inline cascades or direct transactional sends.
• Settings — channel providers, sender identity, cascade order and confirmation choices.
• Feed — a separate in-app publication surface.

Set up the channels

Open Admin → Communications → Settings before promising a channel:

• Email can use the platform sender or the community's configured SMTP sender. Confirm the From name and address. Reply-To and inbound webhook routing are not configured on this Settings form.
• SMS requires an available platform route or configured provider credentials and a valid sender identity where required. If platform BulkSMS credentials are available, choosing Disabled does not currently hard-disable SMS; sends can still fall back to the platform route.
• WhatsApp requires a platform or community provider connection. A community-initiated message outside the customer-service window also needs an approved Meta HSM template.
• Push reaches members only when their mobile app has registered a usable push token.
• In-app creates a notification for a signed-in JollyBee user; it is not an email, text message or feed post.

A contact can have a database record without being reachable on every channel. Address availability, suppression, member preference, provider configuration and provider response all affect the final audience.

Feed is deliberately separate

Admin → Feed publishes an immediate post with text and an optional image. Owners can delete a post. It is not segmented, scheduled, emailed, texted or pushed by the feed action and it has no campaign analytics. Use a campaign as well when the same announcement must actively reach people outside the feed.

Marketing versus transactional

Marketing messages respect the applicable communication preference and suppression rules. Transactional messages can bypass a marketing opt-out when the message is necessary to complete or service an action, but that classification does not guarantee delivery. A missing address, provider failure or invalid token can still prevent it.