What's New in 24Trots: Email Merge Tags, Blast Templates, Customizable Reminders, and More

Personalize email blasts with merge tags that expand per recipient, save and reuse blast templates, set reminders by the minute or hour, and give series members custom date and time ranges.

24Trots Release Notes — August 17, 2026 Release date: August 17, 2026 Update type: Minor version update Applies to: User roles: Admin, Manager, Member · Person types: Staff, Volunteer, Participant Estimated read time: 3 minutes Summary A big week for email and scheduling. Email blasts gained merge tags for per-recipient personalization, a full template system for saving and reusing drafts, role tag subfiltering for recipients, and individual-level exclusions. Alongside those, reminder timing became fully customizable (any number of minutes, hours, or days), series assignments gained per-person custom date and time ranges, Admins can now control whether a specific volunteer appears for open shifts, and a payment responsibility section was added to Participant profiles.

What's New ✉️ Merge Tags in Email Blasts Email blasts now support merge tags — personalized variables that expand per recipient when the email is delivered. Available tags are {{first_name}}, {{full_name}}, {{org_name}}, {{type}} (the recipient's person type), and {{role_tags}} (the recipient's role tag badges, rendered inline). Insert them from the new Tags button in the toolbar or from the bubble menu that appears when you select text in the body. A Send Test delivers a personalized copy to your own inbox using your actual record, and the Preview substitutes values from your account so you see exactly what a recipient would see. Use it when: You're sending a shift reminder and want it to open with "Hi Jordan," instead of a generic greeting — or when you want each person's role tags included inline in the body. 📊 Email Blast Delivery Report After sending a blast, Admins can now open a delivery report for it directly from the Email Blasts list. The report shows a live stats summary — Sent, Delivered, Bounced, Received, Received Rate, Unique Clicks, and Click Rate — and a per-recipient table with each person's delivery state, whether they opened it, whether they clicked, and timestamps for both. Bounced addresses are listed separately with the bounce reason. The page polls for updates for the first few minutes after a blast goes out so stats fill in without a refresh. Use it when: You sent a session reminder to 40 volunteers and want to know who received it, who bounced, and whether anyone clicked through. 📄 Email Blast Templates Admins can now save any email blast body as a reusable template and apply it to future blasts in one click. Open the Templates panel from the compose page to save the current body under a name, apply a saved template to a new draft, or edit and delete existing templates. Templates are shared across all Admins in the organization. Use it when: You send the same monthly schedule reminder every month and want to stop rebuilding the body from scratch each time. ⏱️ Fully Customizable Reminder Timing Session and series reminders are no longer limited to a fixed number of days in advance. Each reminder can now be set to any number + unit combination — minutes, hours, or days. Set one reminder for 3 days before and another for 2 hours before the same session, independently. Use it when: Your volunteers need a heads-up early in the week and then a same-morning nudge on the day of the session. 📅 Custom Date and Time Ranges Per Person in a Series When adding any person — Staff, Volunteer, or Participant — to a recurring series, Admins and Managers can now set a custom start date, end date, and/or time range that applies only to that individual. The rest of the series is unaffected. The dates are enforced automatically: someone whose custom end date has passed will no longer be added to future sessions during series top-up. Use it when: A Participant joins a program mid-season, a Volunteer is only available for the first half of a series, or a Staff member works a different shift window than the rest of the group. 🔔 Notification Settings and Email Delivery Controls Admins now have full control over how every notification in the platform is delivered — and a complete log of what's been sent. Notification Settings page (/notifications/preferences, reachable from the gear icon on the Notifications page): a table of every notification type in the system, organized into groups — Session lifecycle, Personal holidays, Messaging, Volunteer, Horse care, and more. For each type, toggle the in-app and email channels on or off independently. An amber dot marks any setting that has been changed from its default. A Reset to defaults button restores everything at once. Settings → Notifications tab: org-level controls for outbound email delivery. A master switch turns off all emails from your organization at once (assignments, reminders, blasts, and system emails). Below that, per-person-type switches let you disable automated emails for Staff, Volunteers, Participants, or Guardians independently — useful during onboarding or testing without affecting other groups. Use it when: You want to silence notifications for a specific group while keeping them on for everyone else, or verify exactly which channels are active for a given notification type before a busy week. 🙅 Per-Volunteer Open Shift Control A new toggle on each Volunteer profile — visible only to Admins and Managers — controls whether that volunteer can see and self-join open shifts on their dashboard. The default is on for everyone. Turning it off removes that volunteer's view of understaffed sessions without removing them from the platform or any existing rosters. Use it when: A volunteer has been joining shifts they're not yet trained for, and you want coordinators to handle their placement manually. Improvements • Email blast recipient filtering by role tag: When sending to a person type (e.g., Volunteers), you can now narrow the list further by selecting specific role tags — for example, Side Walkers only.

• Accounts-only toggle on blasts: A toggle on the compose page lets you choose between emailing only people with active 24Trots accounts versus all matching people in your org regardless of account status.

• Exclude individuals from a blast: The full recipient list is now shown before sending, with the ability to remove specific people from a particular blast without affecting any other settings.

• Admin notification when a volunteer self-joins a session: Admins receive a notification when a volunteer adds themselves to an open spot in a session.

• Admin notification for new account signups: Admins are notified when someone creates a new account in their organization.

• Payment responsibility section on Participant profiles: Participant profiles now include a section to record who is responsible for payment — name, phone, and email — accessible at a glance without opening edit mode.

• Feed type filter on the Barn Feeding Schedule: A dropdown on the schedule page lets staff filter the view by feed category so large barns can focus on one feed type at a time.

• Notification system overhaul: In-app and email notifications were re-architected for consistency across all roles, with cleaner delivery rules and a more reliable foundation for future notification work.

Fixes • Fixed the Barn Feeding Schedule table cutting off long feed entries — text now wraps instead of truncating.