Why can't I send my request?
Sending puts your organization's name in front of people who did not choose to hear from us. Before that happens, the organization has to prove it is real.
Nothing you have built is lost while you sort this out. A request that cannot be sent is still saved, still editable, and you can still copy each person’s link and send it yourself from your own email.
The organization needs a verified address of its own
Not your login — the organization’s. We email a six-digit code to it and you type the code back. That proves somebody at that address receives mail, which is the one identity fact we can actually check.
It is worth using a shared mailbox rather than a personal one — office@ rather than your own name. That address outlives whoever currently holds the role, and it is printed in the footer of every request you send, as the address a suspicious recipient can write to and check.
It has to be a domain the organization controls
Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo and the other free mailbox providers are refused for an organization’s address. Anyone can open one in any name, so it proves nothing about the organization — and the whole reason the address is worth printing is that it does.
This is a real limitation and worth knowing early: a group with no email domain of its own cannot send through SendGather. It can still build requests and share each person’s link by hand.
Other reasons a send is refused
- Nobody is on the request yet, or it has no fields — there is nothing to ask, or nobody to ask.
- An availability question has no dates on it. A copy made automatically by a repeating request arrives with the dates blank on purpose, because last round’s would be in the past. It is also why a repeat that asks for availability cannot send its copies automatically — somebody has to put this round’s dates in first.
- The deadline has already passed. A request set to close on a date in the past would shut the moment it was sent.
What sending actually does
It locks the questions — the form cannot change under an answer somebody has already given — and it makes every recipient’s link live. You can still add and remove people afterwards.
The message goes out under your name with our address, disclosed as (via SendGather), and replies come back to you. There is more about what a recipient sees on the page we point them at when they want to check it is real.
Requests are not for announcements
An invitation carries no unsubscribe link, because you cannot unsubscribe from being asked a question by name — and they all leave from one shared sending domain, so mail that recipients did not expect damages delivery for every other organization here, not just yours.
Ask named people for specific things. Anything that would be better as a newsletter should go out as one.
Reminders do carry a way out, because they are the second and third time you have written unprompted. If somebody uses it, we stop sending to them for you and the send tells you who — you can’t override it, and you can start again only if they ask you to. Their link keeps working, so you can still pass it on by hand.