Designing emails and working with drafts

The block editor

The Email Studio walks you through a three-stage journey — Audience, Message, and Review & send — with Drafts and History alongside. The Message stage is a block-based canvas — no design skills required. From the block dock beneath the canvas you can add:

• Heading and Sub-Heading — section titles in two sizes.
• Text — paragraphs with full line-break support.
• Image — upload a picture (PNG, JPG, WebP, or GIF, up to 5 MB) or paste an image address.
• Button — a call-to-action with custom text, link, and color. New buttons default to "Donate Now" linked to your donation page.
• Divider — a horizontal rule between sections.
• Spacer — adjustable breathing room, set in pixels.

Click any block on the canvas to open its properties panel, where you can edit content, alignment (left, center, right), text direction (LTR or RTL — handy for Hebrew or Arabic), and colors. Drag the handle beside a block to reorder it, and use the trash icon in the properties panel to delete it.

Tip: Toggle Preview in the palette header to see the email without editing outlines — useful for a final visual check before you move to review.

Personalizing your design

Text blocks, the subject line, and button links all support variables via the Insert Variable menu — for example Team Name in a heading, or Donation URL as a button destination. Variables fill in per recipient at send time, so one design can feel individually written.

Images that work in email

• Keep images under 5 MB and use standard formats.
• Use the width slider (20–100%) to size an image, and set its alignment.
• Uploaded images are hosted for you automatically — recipients see them without any extra steps.

Drafts save themselves

You don't have to finish an email in one sitting — and you don't have to press anything to keep your work:

• As you write, your email saves automatically as a draft on the server (there's also a Save draft action if you want to save on demand).
• Open the Drafts place in the studio to see every draft — each row shows the subject and when it was last touched — and pick any one up exactly where it was left off.
• Drafts are shared with everyone who can use this studio: a colleague can start the weekly update and you can finish it. If someone else edited a draft last, you'll see who when it's restored.
• Deleting a draft removes it for the whole team.

Tip: Because drafts follow the campaign rather than your browser, you can start an email at the office and finish it from your laptop at home — nothing lives only on one machine.

Design tips for better results

• Lead with one clear message and one primary button. Emails with a single call-to-action consistently outperform crowded layouts.
• Use a heading, two or three short text blocks, and a button — most successful campaign emails are that simple.
• Keep your color palette close to your campaign branding so the email is instantly recognizable.
• Preview on your phone: most donors read email on mobile, and the studio's layout is mobile-friendly by default.

Related articles

• Sending an email blast
• Uploading recipient lists from Excel or CSV