Notifications (for admins)

Lurno sends messages when things happen: someone is invited, a role changes, a guardianship needs confirming, a deadline is approaching. The catalogue of those messages is fixed by Lurno. What you control as an administrator is how they read and how they look for your organization — the subject and body wording, the header and footer design, and the domain they’re sent from.

Availability

Plan: any plan — none of this is plan-gated · Permission: permission to update your organization, the same gate as the rest of Org settings

All of it lives on the Org settings page, not on a separate Notifications page. The Notifications entry in the sidebar is a platform-staff surface for editing Lurno’s cross-tenant defaults and is not visible to organization administrators.

Don’t see this in your account? See Plans, permissions & modules.

What this does

Every transactional message Lurno sends is generated from a template — a named entry with a subject, a preheader, a Markdown body, and a set of variables it can interpolate. Lurno ships a default version of each one. Your organization can save an override for any template, which replaces the wording for your organization only, and can supply a branded email header and footer that wrap every message.

Which events exist, and whether each one goes to email, in-app, or both, is set on the template definition by Lurno — not per organization.

Before you start

• You need permission to update your organization. Open Settings → Org settings in the sidebar.
• To send from your own address rather than Lurno’s shared sender, set up email from your domain first.
• Overrides are matched to one organization exactly. A sub-organization does not inherit a parent’s template overrides.

Customize an email template

1. Go to Org settings and open the Email templates tab.
2. Templates are grouped by category — Invitations, Guardianship, Role changes, Content updates, Billing, Transactional, Lifecycle. Each row carries a badge: Using default or Customized.
3. Click a template. An editor panel slides in with three fields you can change: Subject, Preheader, and Body (Markdown). A live preview renders beside them as you type.
4. Use the Variables chips below the body to insert placeholders such as {{orgName}}. Clicking a chip inserts it into whichever of the three fields you last had focused, at your cursor.
5. Use Send test to me at any point to mail the current draft to the email address on your own account.
6. Save. The row now reads Customized and every future send of that template uses your wording.

Reset to default removes your override and puts the template back on Lurno’s copy — it’s available only once an override exists. History lists the changes saved for that template in your organization.

Saving is blocked while the draft fails validation — the panel shows the exact errors above the fields. The validator enforces three things: every variable the template marks as required must still appear somewhere in the body; every {{placeholder}} you use must be one the template declares (or one of the always-available fields such as {{orgName}} and {{year}}); and the subject cannot be empty.

Caution

A handful of shipped templates — the credential, grading, program-sharing and program-duplication ones among them — declare their variables in a format the validator does not read. On those templates the Variables palette shows only the always-available fields, and any placeholder from the template’s own set is reported as an unknown variable, which means Save stays disabled and the template cannot be customized at all. This is a known defect, not a mistake on your part. Contact Lurno support if you hit it on a template you need to change.

What you can’t change here

• Channels. Whether a template sends by email, in-app, or both is part of the template definition and is editable only by Lurno.
• Digests. Bundling emails into a daily or weekly summary is a personal setting each recipient chooses in their own notification preferences. There is no organization-level digest control.
• The catalogue. You can’t add a new template or trigger a notification on an event Lurno doesn’t already cover.

Brand the email header and footer

The Notifications branding tab controls the header and footer applied to every email your organization sends. Header and Footer are separate tabs, each with two modes:

• Guided — pick a Header layout (Centered logo, Logo left + tagline, Logo + color bar) and fill Logo URL, Tagline and Brand color (hex); or a Footer layout (Simple copyright, Social links + address) and fill Physical address, Brand color and — on the social layout — a repeatable list of label + URL links.
• Raw HTML — supply your own HTML and plain-text bodies. This bypasses the guided editor, so the markup must be email-safe: tables, inline styles, no scripts.

Both modes validate and preview live, and both offer Save and Reset to default.

Caution

The Guided tab does not load your saved header or footer back into its fields — it always opens with the layout dropdown at its first option and every field blank, even when a branded header is live. Only the Raw HTML tab shows what you previously saved. Treat Guided as “compose a new one”, check the preview before you save, and don’t press Save on a blank Guided form unless you mean to replace what’s live.

Send from your own domain

The Notification domains tab is where you register a sending subdomain (for example mail.example.com), copy the DNS records Lurno generates into your DNS provider, and verify it with Verify now / Re-check DNS. Once verified, mail to your people comes from your organization’s domain instead of Lurno’s shared sender, and your organization owns DKIM signing for it. Full walkthrough: email from your domain.

Platform alerts

Announcements Lurno sends to your organization — service notices, incident updates — collect on a separate Platform alerts page at /dashboard/notifications/alerts. There is no sidebar entry for it today, so you reach it by typing that address. It is a read-only list: a severity pill, title, body, timestamp, and an Open link when the alert points somewhere in the app. There is no reply, no dismiss, and no mark-as-read. Viewing it requires permission to view platform alerts; without that you’ll see a “you don’t have permission” message instead of the list. See Your notification inbox.

Reference

Surface	Where	What you control
Email templates	Org settings → Email templates	Subject, preheader, Markdown body per template; reset; history; send test
Notifications branding	Org settings → Notifications branding	Header and footer layout, logo, tagline, brand color, social links, address — or raw HTML
Notification domains	Org settings → Notification domains	Register, verify, and manage your own sending subdomains
Platform alerts	/dashboard/notifications/alerts	Read only — announcements Lurno sent to your organization
Channels & digests	Not org-configurable	Channels are set by Lurno per template; digests are each recipient’s personal preference

Troubleshooting

The Save button stays greyed out. Either nothing has changed yet, or the draft failed validation. Check the error list above the fields. If it reports your template’s own placeholders as unknown variables, you’ve hit the known variables-format defect described above — that template can’t be customized until Lurno fixes its definition.

Validation says a required variable is missing. You deleted a {{placeholder}} the template needs, such as an invitation link. Put it back — click its chip in the Variables palette — and the error clears.

I can’t find a Notifications page in the sidebar. For organization administrators there isn’t one. Template wording, branding, and sending domains all live on Org settings.

My branded header looks empty when I reopen the Guided tab. That’s the display defect described above — Guided always opens blank. Switch to Raw HTML to see what is actually saved.

Emails still come from Lurno’s address. Your sending domain isn’t verified yet. Check its status on the Notification domains tab and re-check DNS; propagation can take from fifteen minutes to a few hours.

Someone says they get too many emails. There is no organization-level digest. Point them at their own notification preferences, where they can switch categories off or bundle emails into a daily or weekly digest. Security-critical mail always sends regardless.

A test email never arrived. Send test to me mails the signed-in account’s own address. Check that address’s spam folder, and confirm your sending domain is verified if you’ve configured one.

Related

• Notification preferences
• Your notification inbox
• Email from your domain
• Organization settings overview
• Branding & theming