Writing messages

Reviewing your messages

Before you send messages to recipients, you must review and approve your templates. This allows you to check how your messages will be displayed. This is sometimes referred to as proofing.

It’s your responsibility to review your templates in a way that meets your service’s needs. Make sure:

• relevant stakeholders in your team have approved your template
• there are no errors in your formatting, personalisation or message content
• you check your message length

Reviewing NHS App, email and text message templates

After you’ve created an NHS App, email or text message template, you should send a test message.

For NHS App messages, you can send test messages to your test NHS App account using the NHS number.

For emails and text messages, you can send test messages to your email address, mobile number or a shared inbox. We recommend using work contact details.

To send a test message:

1. In Templates, open the template you want to test.
2. Select Send a test message.
3. Enter the contact details you want to send the test message to, or add new contact details.
4. If you’ve personalised your message, enter example data to check how your personalisation fields will be displayed. Find out more about personalising your messages.
5. Select Send test message.

You can edit your template and send more test messages if you need to.

Once you’ve checked your test message and received stakeholder approval, you can add your template to your message plans.

Reviewing and approving letters

Once you’ve uploaded your letter template file, you can view an on-screen PDF preview of it.

If you’ve personalised your message, enter short and long example data to check how your personalisation fields will be displayed. Find out more about personalising your messages.

Once you’ve reviewed your letter and received stakeholder approval, select Approve letter template.

You can then add your approved letter template to your message plans.