3.) Communications, Templates & Email Settings

Communications

Welcome back! We hope the training has been informative so far. Today we're diving into communications, templates and emailing from SAM.

Communications are of course, a huge part of your job as a case manager, social worker or administrator. SAM helps organize all of your emails, case notes, phone conversations and more in one place to save you time and frustration. 

Let's get started! 

Communications are available for all record types in SAM. This is where your team will enter case notes and track other communications between or about this client and your team.

Communications are added by: 

• Manual Entry
• Emails or invoices and receipts sent directly from SAM
• Email Importing

Oftentimes, adding communications manually will be for phone calls and in person visits, though some teams decide to copy and paste emails into the communications page. 

To avoid copying and pasting emails, you can enable email importing for your team. More on email importing at the end of this guide. 

To add a communication, simply click in the entity's record (family, child, etc.) and then click "communication" and "add communication."

Based on your specific program requirements, your admin can customize the "communication types" and "communication topic type" by adding a new communication, then clicking "edit." 

Communications are listed in chronological order with the most recent at the top. To view/edit the details of a communication, click the details icon located at the bottom-right for each communication.  

There are two ways to delete a communication record: in the communications screen and in the communication itself. For both, you'll click on "Advanced Options." 

In the communication overview page, you'll click "Delete a Sub Record." 

Little red "X's" will then be visible: click the one next to the record you want to delete.

You can also delete a record from within the communication record itself. Open the communication record, then click "Advanced Options" and "Delete Communications." 

Templates

Now to take some of the weight off your team, templates are an awesome resource for you. 

With templates you can create personalized emails to families or care partners as well as to your team as a notification of progress milestones or reminders for a case. You might also use them to print documentation that draws from a youth’s file. 

To get to the template section, click "settings" (at the top of the screen or the sidebar), then scroll down and click on template designer. 

Read more about designing, editing and using templates 

Email Settings

Now that you know how you can use SAM to send and import emails, you’ll need to connect SAM to your email provider. We have detailed instructions for you below. If you get stuck, contact our support team. 

There are three email settings in SAM to configure:

• Email Sending 
• Email Importing
• Individual User Email Setup

Read the Email Settings Guides for Default/System wide setup

Read the setup guide for individual user email settings

Your team will spend a lot of time in SAM’s Communications section. We hope you take advantage of setting up Templates and let SAM support your case note requirements with email importing. 

See you next time!