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Every church’s connect card is different, so Dispatch learns yours rather than assuming a standard layout. You upload one blank or filled-in card and it detects the fields: names, contact details, checkboxes, prayer request boxes, and so on.

Those detected fields are what everything else is built on. Automations trigger off them, and the report can only chase people whose card has an email address on it.

If your card changes. Print a new design and Dispatch will keep reading the old fields until you tell it otherwise. Upload the new card under Templates and re-run detection. Automations pointing at a field that no longer exists are flagged for you rather than silently doing nothing.

Scanning tips. A flatbed scan or a straight-on phone photo both work. Keep two pages per card, front then back, in the same order throughout the PDF. An odd number of pages means the last card is treated as having no back.

An automation says: when this happens on a card, send this email to this person. For example, when someone ticks “I have a prayer request”, send the Prayer Confirmation email to your prayer team.

Dispatch suggests automations built from your own card’s fields, so most churches can set theirs up by reviewing a list rather than writing rules from scratch. Each one shows you in plain English what it will do before you save it.

Choosing the email. Every automation names which email template it sends. Leave it on “let Dispatch pick” and it guesses from the field name, which is how older rules behaved. Choosing explicitly is better.

Who receives it. An automation sends to the address you put in the To box. That is true whichever urgency you pick, so a rule is a way of telling a team, not a way of writing to the person who filled in the card. People are written to by the default welcome, prayer confirmation and similar templates, and by follow-ups.

Urgency and priority. Escalate marks something as urgent, which is what the crisis automation uses. Priority decides which automation runs first when several match the same card; lower numbers run earlier.

You can pause any automation without deleting it. A paused automation stops firing immediately and keeps its settings.

Automations handle the moment a card arrives. Follow-ups handle the silence afterwards: someone fills in a card, you reach out, and you never hear back.

When follow-ups are on, everyone whose card carries an email address is enrolled as their batch is sent. Dispatch then writes to them on the schedule you set, for example after three days and again after a week. Each message carries a link to a couple of short questions.

Answering stops everything. The moment someone submits an answer, the sequence stops and your team is emailed. Nobody who has replied is ever nudged again. The point is that a person only hears from a human once they are actually engaged, and their answers tell you what they want before anyone picks up the phone.

Where the replies go. The Follow-ups page in the main menu lists everyone currently being contacted, everyone who has replied and what they said, and everyone who never answered. Replies sort to the top, because those are the people waiting on you.

Follow-ups are off until you switch them on, and they only apply to cards sent after that. Turning them off stops new enrolments and stops anyone currently mid-sequence from receiving anything further.

The Follow-up page under Insights shows what Dispatch did with each card after you approved it. It reports only what Dispatch itself sent. It cannot see a phone call, a conversation in the foyer, or an email sent from your own inbox, and it will not pretend otherwise.

Cards are grouped by what actually happened:

• Emailed by Dispatch. A message genuinely went to that person.
• Held back by settings. Dispatch prepared a message, but you have that email template switched off. This is a setting you chose, not a failure, so these are not listed as problems.
• Failed to send. Dispatch tried and delivery failed, usually a mistyped address on the card. Worth fixing.
• Nothing queued. No message was ever created, because no automation matched and no default applied. Worth checking your automations, though it can be perfectly correct for a card that was only a contact-detail update.

Who is counted. Only approved cards carrying an email address. Anonymous cards and cards with no contact details are left out entirely, because there was no way to write back and counting them would make your numbers look worse than reality.

If every individual email template is switched off, the page says so at the top. In that case Dispatch is being used to route to your teams, who follow up personally, and the report simply cannot speak to whether that happened.

The free trial has two limits and whichever you reach first ends it: 30 days and 50 cards. Dispatch warns you in the app as either one gets close.

No card details are needed to start a trial and nothing is charged automatically when it ends. Processing simply pauses until you pick a plan. Your account and everything already in it stay put.

A batch is counted as a whole. If you have 20 cards left and upload a stack of 60, the upload is refused rather than half processed. Choose a plan first, or split the stack.