Mail Room: Emails, Labels, and Exports for Group, District, and Region Users

What is the Mail Room?

The Mail Room is where parent-group (the parent organization that oversees all locals — for example, a state-level body or national association), region, and district users build a mailing list and then send an email, print labels or envelopes, or export member data.

It works the same way the old Labels / Emails screen did: you build an audience of members first, and then you choose what to do with that audience. If you used the old screen, that two-stage idea is unchanged. What is new is the screen itself, and the fact that district and region users now have their own access to it instead of relying on the parent-group office.

What changed: The classic Labels / Emails screen has been retired for parent-group, region, and district users. That screen is now visible only to Groupable staff. If you have a bookmark or a habit of going to the old screen and it is no longer there, this guide is where you start.

Who Can Use It and What Each Role Sees

Anyone with access to the Mail Room reaches it the same way (see "Opening the Mail Room" below), but the tabs and drop-down lists you see depend on your role. The system enforces this automatically — district and region users are never shown data outside their own area, even if they try to select it.

A few more details on how the tabs behave by role:

• Region and District drop-downs. On the tabs that let you narrow results by region or district, parent-group users see both a Regions list and a Districts list. Region users see a Districts list (limited to the districts in their own region) but no Regions list, since they belong to only one region. District users see neither list — their results are automatically limited to their own district without needing to pick anything.
• Locals list. Everyone sees a Locals list on the tabs that offer one, but it only ever contains the locals you're allowed to see: all locals for parent-group users, the locals in your region for region users, and the locals in your district for district users.
• Even if a district or region user were to submit a request with a different district or region's ID in it, the system checks every submission against your assigned area and discards anything outside it. You cannot see or mail to another district or region's members through the Mail Room.

Step by Step

Opening the Mail Room

1. From the main menu, click Mailing.
2. Click Labels / Emails.

You land on the Mail Room page. Across the top are tabs for the sources you're allowed to use (see the table above). Below the tabs, once you've added at least one group of members, you'll see your audience so far.

Each tab is its own small form. You fill in what you want, click Add to Audience, and the matching members are added. You can repeat this on the same tab or switch to a different tab and add more — your audience keeps growing until you remove something or send it somewhere (more on that below).

Group Level Officers tab (parent-group users only)

Use this tab to mail to people currently holding a parent-group office.

• Officer Positions — select one or more offices (for example, "President" or "Secretary"). Hold Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) to select more than one. Leave this blank to include every parent-group office.
• Ballot — a filter with three choices: All, Yes, and No. Yes limits the list to offices your organization has marked as filled by ballot (an election); No limits it to offices that are not. Leave it on All unless you specifically need one or the other.

Click Add to Audience to add the matching officers.

Roster tab (parent-group and region users, when your organization uses roster sections)

Use this tab to mail to everyone listed in specific sections of your organization's roster (for example, the section listing local secretaries, or a section listing a particular committee).

• Roster Sections To Include — select one or more sections. All sub-sections of a section you select are automatically included, so you don't need to check every sub-section by hand.
• Districts (parent-group and region users) / Regions (parent-group users only) — optionally narrow the roster members to a specific district or region.

You must select at least one roster section before clicking Add to Audience; the page will tell you if you didn't.

This tab only appears if your organization has roster sections defined and if you are a parent-group or region user.

Group Level Committees tab (parent-group users only)

Use this tab to mail to people serving on parent-group committees.

• Officer Positions — the committee-level offices (for example, "Chairman").
• Committees — one or more specific committees.
• Ballot — same All / Yes / No filter described above, applied to committee positions.

Click Add to Audience to add the matching committee members.

Region, District, and Local Officers tab (everyone)

Use this tab to mail to officers at the local, district, or region level. This tab is available to every role covered by this guide.

• Officer Positions — a single list grouped into three sections labeled Lodge, District, and Region (the screen uses the word "Lodge" here even though your organization may call this unit a chapter or a local group; it means your local). Select offices from any of the three groups.
• Locals, Districts, Regions — narrow the officers to specific locals, districts, or regions. Which of these lists you see depends on your role, as described in the table above.

Click Add to Audience to add the matching officers.

Membership tab (everyone)

Use this tab to mail to members based on their status, type, and other attributes, rather than an office they hold. This is the most flexible tab and is available to every role covered by this guide.

• Member Type — the kinds of membership your organization uses (for example, regular member, honorary member).
• Group Status — the member's standing at the parent-group level (for example, active, suspended).
• Affiliation Status — the member's standing in their local.
• Locals, Districts, Regions — narrow to specific locals, districts, or regions (subject to the same role-based limits described above).
• Member Attributes — checkboxes for Exempt From Dues, Endowed, Fifty-Year Members, Permanent member, and Past Group Level Officer. Check any that apply; leave all unchecked to ignore this filter.
• Subscriptions — members subscribed to one or more of your organization's publications or lists.
• Active Donors — check this box to filter to members who have made a donation, and optionally enter a Start Date and End Date to limit the donation window.

Click Add to Audience to add the matching members. When you first open this tab, the Group Status and Affiliation Status fields are pre-filled with your organization's active statuses, so a plain click of Add to Audience with nothing else changed gives you your active membership.

After you click Add to Audience

Each time you click Add to Audience on any tab, one of three things happens:

• If members matched, you're returned to the same tab and a message tells you how many members were added to your audience (for example, "12 Members Added To Audience").
• If nothing matched your filters, you see a message that no members were found matching the selected criteria. Nothing is added.
• If something was wrong with your selections (for instance, the Roster tab with no section chosen), you see a message explaining the problem.

Adding from more than one tab

You are not limited to one tab. A common approach is to add your parent-group officers from one tab, then switch to Membership and add another group, then switch to Region, District, and Local Officers and add a third. Every addition stacks on top of the last one — nothing is cleared out when you move between tabs or submit another selection. Duplicate people are only counted once in your final audience.

What to Do With the Audience

Once you've added at least one group of members, an audience panel appears directly on the Mail Room page, below the tabs. At the top of that panel is a line reading "Your Audience Contains: [a number] unique parties" — that's your running total. Below it is a table listing every group you've added, what you searched for, and how many members that group contributed.

You do not need to leave the Mail Room page to use this audience — the same panel and the same set of action buttons also appear if you go to Mailing > Advanced Audience Builder (a page titled "Find Members" once you get there), since both pages work from the same audience.

Below the table are the action buttons:

Since Labels and Envelopes, Mail Merge Export, and Export all lead to the same page, the choice of what you actually get — a printed label sheet, an envelope, a spreadsheet, or a mail-merge file — is made on that page with the Format field, not by which button you clicked.

Labels, Envelopes, Mail Merge, and Export page

This page has an Output Settings panel on the left and your audience panel on the right, so you can always see who you're producing output for.

The Format field offers these choices:

• Envelope Number 10 — a printable #10 envelope.
• Avery 5160 Labels (3x10) — a standard 3-across, 10-down sheet of address labels.
• Avery 5161 Labels (2x10) — a 2-across, 10-down sheet of address labels.
• Mail Merge List — a data file meant to be merged into a letter template in another program (such as a word processor).
• Excel Export — a spreadsheet of your audience's member data, including more detail than the label formats (status, affiliation, contact information, and more).

If you choose one of the Avery label formats, a grid appears labeled Start Printing From, letting you click the position on the sheet where printing should begin — useful when you're reusing a partly-used sheet of labels.

Other settings on this page:

• Exclude Prefer Email — leave out members who have told you they prefer to be reached by email rather than postal mail.
• Exclude Members With No Solicitations — leave out members who have opted out of solicitations.
• Only Members With No Solicitations — the reverse: include only members who have opted out of solicitations.
• Use Shipping Address — use a member's shipping address instead of their regular mailing address, if your organization tracks one.
• Show Key Line — adds a line of basic identifying information at the top of each label or envelope, to help you match returned mail back to the right member.
• Sort — choose the order for your output: Last Name, Postal Code, Local, or District And Local.
• Include Officer Dupes — if checked, a member is printed once for every office they hold within your audience. For example, someone who is secretary of two locals would produce two labels, one for each local.
• Envelope Return Address — a text box for the return address to print on envelopes. This only applies to envelope output.
• Donor Settings — optionally enter a start and end date to narrow your output to members who have not made a donation in that window, useful for a fundraising follow-up mailing.

Click Print to produce the file. For a small audience, the file downloads right away. For a larger audience, the file is prepared in the background and a download link appears when it's ready.

Reports

Clicking Create Report takes you to a page where you choose a report Format and click Submit. A Contact List and a Birthday List are always available. Depending on how your organization is configured, you may also see a Walking List or a Years in Good Standing list.

Clearing the audience

There isn't a single button that empties your whole audience at once. Instead:

• To remove one group you added, find its row in the audience table and click the trash-can icon at the left of that row. That removes just the members from that one addition — any other groups you've added stay in place.
• After you send an email to your audience, you're asked whether you'd like to keep that same audience to use for labels or envelopes next, or clear it. Choosing to clear it there empties the whole audience at once.

Tips / Good to Know

• Your audience is not tied to one browser tab or session in a way you need to worry about losing it by navigating around M2 — it stays in place as you move between the Mail Room, Advanced Audience Builder, and the output pages, until you remove entries or clear it.
• Adding the same person from two different tabs (for example, as both a district officer and a member matching your Membership filters) does not create a duplicate in your final count — each person is only counted once.
• The Roster tab lists sections in the same numbered order as your printed roster book, indented to show sub-sections.
• If you're not sure which tab has what you need, the Membership tab is the most flexible starting point — it can filter by local, district, region, member type, and status all in one form.

Troubleshooting

My audience shows zero members after I click Add to Audience. Check your filters — a combination that's too narrow (for example, a member type that no one in your selected local currently holds) will correctly return nothing. Try removing one filter at a time to see which one is excluding everyone. The message "No members found matching the selected criteria" means nothing was added; your existing audience, if any, is unaffected.

I'm a district user and I can't see another district's members. This is expected. District and region users are limited to their own area everywhere in the Mail Room — there is no setting that expands this. If you need a mailing that spans multiple districts or the whole region, ask your parent-group office to run it.

Some members are missing from my printed labels or envelopes, but they were in my audience count. Labels, envelopes, and mail merge output only include members who have a mailing address on file. A member without one is silently left off those outputs, even though they're still counted in your audience total. The Excel Export format does not have this restriction — it includes every member in your audience, with blank address fields for anyone missing one. If you need to find who's missing an address, run the Excel Export and look for blank address columns, or check the person's profile directly.

Some members didn't get my email. On the Email page, check the "invalid email addresses" list before you send — that list shows exactly who in your audience has no usable email address on file. Consider following up with them by mail using the Labels and Envelopes option instead. If a member has a valid address on file and still didn't get the email, it is usually landing in their spam folder or being blocked by their email provider. See Why am I not receiving emails? and How to Safelist the system emails?.

Glossary

Group — The parent organization that oversees all locals, districts, and regions. Examples include a state-level governing body or a national association.

Local — An individual unit within your organization where members hold their primary membership. Depending on your organization, this might correspond to a lodge, chapter, local committee, or similar body. The Region, District, and Local Officers tab uses the word "Lodge" on screen for this level regardless of your organization's own term for it.

District — An organizational grouping of locals, typically within a region.

Region — A larger organizational area that contains one or more districts.

Member — A person who holds membership in your group.

Affiliation — A member's specific membership in a local.

Audience — The working list of members you build in the Mail Room before sending an email, printing labels or envelopes, generating a report, or exporting data. You build it up tab by tab, and it stays in place until you remove entries or clear it.