Frequently Asked Questions

SmartMessage Center from CircleUp is a whole new way to communicate with everyone on your group, including staff, volunteers, players, parents, coaches, league officials, fans and more. It is free and easy to use. With SmartMessage Center, you can avoid the dreaded "reply all" that causes a blizzard of emails going back and forth between you and the rest of your group.

SmartMessage Center makes all of your group communication much easier and faster, saving you time and making you and your whole group more efficient. It also helps to keep your groups and group parents more engaged with timely content and important group information.

With SmartMessage Center you can avoid:

• Searching through your inbox to find replies from everyone who responded
• Tracking who replied and who didn't
• Getting replies to your question sent in different formats
• Having to cut and paste answers into a Word document or Excel spreadsheet to aggregate them
• Annoying "reply to all" messages that disrupt the group and clutter your inbox
• Fumbling through your mailbox archives to find old information
• Not being able to share answers with the group or save them for the future

Yes! Anyone can use SmartMessage at no cost. In the future, new advanced services may be offered as premium feature, but today SmartMessage Center is completely free to use!

Just visit the CircleUp.com home page and click on "Sign Up Now" to create your free account and get started. Just click on "New SmartMessage" and off you go!

SmartMessage Center on CircleUp requires a Windows PC or Mac, running Internet Explorer v6.0 or greater or the latest versions of Firefox or Safari. Your browser must also have cookies turned on. A high speed internet connection is recommended. Other computer browser types and mobile browsers may work, but are currently not fully supported.

Absolutely. Your personal information is protected and you are in complete control over who sees your messages and who may share your contact circles. Our software and hosting data centers employ the highest levels of security.

At this time, unfortunately, we would not be able to recover it. SmartMessages are like email messages or other files in that, after you confirm your desire to delete them, we honor that request and they are no longer in our system.

CircleUp is a leading provider group communications. For more information on CircleUp, visit their web site: http://www.circleup.com.

Yes! SmartMessage Center is great for communicating with volunteers, parent/teacher groups, associations, family members and many other groups.

Just go to the "My Account" tab within SmartMessage Center and go to the "Channels" sub-menu to link all of your other email, IM or social networks.

Any Windows PC or Mac computer using most common browsers with Adobe Flash version 9.0 or greater should be able to play all of our SmartMessage help videos.
Click Here to install the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Please visit our eteamz support page for contact options.

Yes. All of your SmartMessage recipients may respond without having an account with CircleUp. However, they do need to set up an account in CircleUp in order to send SmartMessages or to upload their photo.

Photos that are larger than 170x180 pixels will be resized automatically to fit. However, the source image must be smaller than 1MB in size before uploading it.

SmartMessage can send messages to email, instant messaging, and social networking addresses. The Channels page allows you to link to your accounts on these services so that you may send SmartMessage to email addresses which reside there. You may also "de-link" any of these services or change the account login information for each service using this page.

To link other non-CircleUp services:

• Select on the "Add" links below to make your accounts and addresses available to SmartMessage Center.
• Once you "link" an account, that service will remain "authoritative" for those addresses, so you won’t need to update them within SmartMessage. They will be updated automatically via the source accounts and services and become available to you within SmartMessage Center.

For contacts coming coming from other source services and networks, such as Kintera, eteamz, AIM, Yahoo! IM or Facebook, you can go to your account at each service, make any changes to email addresses or contacts, and these changes will be reflected in SmartMessage Center.

For other contacts that you have added via the SmartMessage Composer, you will need to go to CircleUp.com, log-in using your CircleUp log in and password, and then go to "My Account" and then "Contacts". Here you can make changes to email addresses that you’ve added manually via the SmartMessage Composer. Note that you may not make changes to addresses added via CircleUp rosters or other services using this page. Very soon, you will be able to make changes to these addresses right within your CircleUp SmartMessage Center.

While composing a message, you may enter any new contact email addresses by clicking on the "Add Contacts" button. You then may type in or copy and paste addresses or click on the "add contacts from address books" to access addresses from Outlook, Yahoo!, etc.

No. We take your group contact information very seriously and you and your users will not receive unsolicited email as a result of using the SmartMessage Center.

This feature will be coming very soon to SmartMessage Center, so please check back.

Sending SmartMessages is easy and we have provided lots of pre- formatted templates for many of the most common messages you’ll send to your group throughout the season.

Within the SmartMessage Center, if you click on the "SmartMessage" orange button or if you click on the "Templates" tab you will be presented with a series of message templates which are the most commonly types of messages used by members in communicating with groups. You may either choose one of these templates, or, if you click on the SmartMessage button, you may choose to "Skip Templates" and create your own format for your message.

Templates are the most common types of messages that CircleUp members will want to send to their groups. By selecting a template such as "Select Your Uniform Sizes", your SmartMessage Message Composer will be pre- formatted with a subject line, a message body, in some cases, enclosures, and then a pre-selected type of response that the recipients will see. While templates pre-populate all these areas, it’s very easy to modify or change any one of these areas with your own custom subject line, message, etc.

Personal or custom templates are retrievable when composing a new, blank SmartMessage and typing in a subject line for the new message. When composing a new SmartMessage, start typing in the subject line you may have used for a previously SmartMessage that you want to copy. You should be given a list of "suggested subject lines." Look for the subject used for the one you want to copy, select it from the drop down list, and then you can update it as you see fit and send. The only requirement is that you type in the subject exactly as you did for the one that you'd like to copy (or at least close enough that allows our system to find it using keywords).

This is a small and easy to fill-in window that allows you to send messages to your group members. It’s similar to a window for sending emails that you’d find in email software or web sites, but it allows you to do so much more. You can add your recipients in the "To" line, type your subject line, message, add enclosures, and determine what types of responses you’d like to get from your group using various response types. You may also add an enclosure or link and determine who may see the summary or full results of your responses.

While in the message composer, simply click on the "To:" button. You will then see a address tree or directory. To expand or contract the various parts of the directory, just click on the "plus" or "minus" signs. Here you will see your CircleUp member email addresses across various leagues and groups, and types of addresses (coaches, players, parents, etc). If you have linked any other outside services or networks, such as Yahoo! IM or AIM, you will also see those here.

You may select an entire part of the address directory by clicking on the box next to it, or you may select individual addresses by placing a check in the box next to each address.

Here, you may also click on the "Add Contacts" button to add new email addresses. You may then enter email addresses or click on "add contacts from you address book" to pull in emails from Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail or AOL Mail. Once finished you can also select which group within the address directory/tree that you’d like these new emails to belong to (or leave blank).

When finished, click on "save" and then "Ok"" and your groups and addresses will be displayed in the "To:" addressing field.

Response formats allow you to determine how information is sent, structured and collected from your group. For example, if you just want to send an announcement to your group and do not need to collect information from them, you would choose the "Announcement" response format (the one with the red megaphone symbol). All of the response formats will also allow your respondents to enter open-ended "comments".

Choices: Provide choice options for your respondents to evaluate and select, such as choosing a group MVP, group name, location for the group dinner, etc. For each choice, you may also add an enclosure, which could be graphics of uniform designs or links to maps for each possible group dinner location. The choices are presented as radio buttons and, thus, respondents may select only one choice. In the future, multiple choice options may be made available.

Announcements: Use this when you only need to communicate information or send files, but don’t need responses back (other than comments).

Suggestions: Collect open- ended suggestions or responses, such as collecting the best photos from the season or suggested places to hold the group dinner. Respondents can respond and/or upload any number of files that you specify by choosing the number of suggestion fields.

Rows and Columns: This format enables you to collect information using a grid and is perfect for signing up volunteers to bring food items for the bake sale or for collecting uniform sizes, etc.

Rating: Your respondents can rate various options by assigning a "Thumbs down" or anywhere from one to five "thumbs up". An average of the ratings across all users for each item is tabulated on the results page to show which choices are most and least popular.

Ranking: Similar to the Choices and Rating formats, this collecting input on a list of discreet choices. However, this one forces respondents to rank the options in order of preference.

Yes or No: Just as the name implies, you collect yes or no responses to a message or question. This is good for fast responses on practice or game or other event attendance.

Contact Info: Collect all the up-to-date contact information for each of the players on your group. You may select which types of contact information you would like to collect.

This feature will be coming to SmartMessage in December 2008.

In addition to the response format sections of your message, you may also direct your team to the "Comments" section(s) to collect multiple pieces of information. In the future, we may also offer the ability to have multiple response types per SmartMessage.

When composing messages using the Message Composer, clicking on the "Privacy" link will allow you to change who may see the summary or detailed results of your message.

As the sender, you are always able to see all responses, comments and response detail.

You then may also choose to share results with just the message "Recipients", or with "Anyone" who might visit your results page. If you check the "Summary" box, only a summary tabulation of all responses is viewable. If you check the "Responses" box, all details of the results, including any comments made by respondents and each individual response is viewable.

Using the buttons at the bottom of the Composer, you may:

• "Save" your message as a draft, which will be available for you in your "Sent" tab within the SmartMessage Center. You may come back to finish your message and send or delete later.
• "Test it" which will send a test version of your message ONLY to you at your email address that is on file for you in your CircleUp account. This allows you to see what your respondents will see when receiving your SmartMessage. You may then make and changes, save again as draft and/or send your message.
• "Send" your message. This will immediately send your message to everyone on your "To:" list.

You may send a test to yourself using the "test it" button in the SmartMessage Composer which will send the message only to you. From there, you will see what your recipients will experience.

Test messages and live messages should arrive to you within just a few moments. Occasionally there may be a delay, either with your Internet Service Provider or company mail servers or, although it should be rare, messages may be moved by your email software or servers into a "Junk Mail" folder. Check these folders and/or have your group member(s) check these folders. Be sure to mark your received SmartMessage emails as "not SPAM" or "not junk mail" and/or add the SmartMessage "from" address to your "safe senders" list. If you or your recipients still have not received a SmartMessage, you may return to the Sent folder, click on the SmartMessage to open the Results page, and then check the box under the "resend" button and click "resend."

Yes, you may re-send SmartMessages to members who have not already responded to a message. In the SmartMessage results page, in the "Not Yet Replied" tab, there are check boxes under the "Resend" button. Simply click the boxes next to messages that you’d like to resend to and then click on the "Resend" button at the top.

While in your Inbox or Sent box views, to delete individual messages, click on the small triangle icon to the far left of each message and select "Delete". You may also open each message, and click on the small "trash can" icon in the top, middle of the results page.

Just as you may not cancel or edit emails once they have been sent, you currently are not able to cancel or edit messages after they have been sent. You may, however, add a Comment to a SmartMessage Results page.

These features are currently not available but may be available in future releases.

Yes, your recipients do not have to be registered with CircleUp. In order to send SmartMessages, CircleUp site admins will need to add these users to their site Roster.

Go to your "Sent" tab within the SmartMessage Center. Open the SmartMessage to view the Results page. Here, towards the bottom of the page there are tabs showing "Responses" and "Not Yet Replied."

From the Results page, click on the "add people" button and add contacts as you would if you were composing an original message.

On the Results page, click on the "post comment" button. Any comments posted here will be available for members authorized to view the Results page.

Check to be sure that your account on CircleUp contains a valid, current email address for you and that this email is where you want your SmartMessages sent. Be sure to also check your "Junk Mail" or SPAM folders to be sure that your email filtering programs have not misfiled the emails. If they have, be sure to add the source of these messages to your Safe Senders list.

The privacy setting allows the author of a SmartMessage to determine who can see the results of the SmartMessage and whether they can see all of the responses or just the summary.

Currently, you may only upload one attachment or add one web link to a field or a message at a time. In the future, we may add the ability to upload more than one attachment per SmartMessage or entry field.

You can go right back to your email inbox and open the SmartMessage again by clicking on the link. Your previous response will be there and you can edit it, change it or add to it and click Reply. Also, you can visit your SmartMessage Center inbox on your CircleUp web site and make the change there also. Either way, the info will automatically be updated on the Result page.

The best way for additional users to be added to a SmartMessage is for you or the sender to return to the corresponding SmartMessage Results page, and click on the "add people" button which is in the center of the page.

In the future, SmartMessage Center will offer support for sending and responding to SmartMessages on mobile devices using SMS. Currently, while you may be able to perform some or all SmartMessage functions on your mobile device, these devices are not currently supported.

After receiving a SmartMessage, be sure to add the "Reply to" email address to the "safe sender’s list" within your email package or service. When sending SmartMessages, try to avoid all CAPS, and words like FREE and other marketing or "spammy" words as these may tend to trigger SPAM prevention programs which might mark your SmartMessage as Junk Mail.

If you are the sender of the SmartMessage, go to the "Sent" tab within your SmartMessage Center. Then, just click on a message and you will be taken to the Results Page for that message.

If you have received and already responded to the SmartMessage, you may go to the "Inbox" tab within SmartMessage Center and then open the message for which you would like to review the results.

The sender of the SmartMessage may have set the privacy settings so that others may only view a "summary" of the response data.

This is a summary of the activity for a given SmartMessage. "Total" refers to the total number of recipients of the message. "Direct" shows a fraction in which the top number is the number of direct recipients who have responded and the bottom number is the number of direct recipients who have been sent the message. "Relayed" refers to the number of responses and sends for people who were sent the SmartMessage after it had already been sent the first time.

On the Results page in the top right corner there is an area called "Output Options", you may export the results to Excel, print them or save them as an Adobe PDF file.

Assuming that the privacy settings of the SmartMessage allow all users to see the results, you may copy and paste the web address (also known as "URL") in the web address portion of your browser and then email this URL or send it via Instant Message to the person for whom you'd like to share the results.

This feature will be available very soon, so please check back again.

Please click here to start the download.

The toolbar file is typically less than 400K in size and should download and install very quickly on most systems.

The SmartMessage Toolbar for Microsoft Outlook allows you to send and receive SmartMessages right from within Outlook. It also has useful links to commonly viewed CircleUp and Active web pages.

The SmartMessage Toolbar for Microsoft Outlook works with Outlook versions 2002, 2003 and 2007, and on Windows 2000, XP and Vista platforms. Outlook Express does not support toolbars, therefore you will not be able to use it.

Yes, you can send and respond to SmartMessages from either the eteamz site or using the Outlook toolbar or any combination of both.

No, there are no additional costs to use the toolbar.

Yes. Once SmartMessages are received or sent in the SmartMessage Center, they are accessible to you in whatever way you access the SmartMessage Center, either via the web site or via the toolbar.

Please click here to contact CircleUp support.

In the toolbar, click on the "New SmartMessage" drop-down menu and select "Create a new circle from Outlook". Then, you may choose from your email addresses and distribution lists, add them to an existing circle or you may create new circle by typing the name of the circle into the open entry field.