Checking Your Email and Replying in GC GO: A Guide for Students

Welcome! Sending a great email is only half the job — the magic happens when a constituent writes back. GC GO keeps the whole conversation in one place, so when someone replies you’ll know about it, you can read the full thread, and you can write back without ever leaving the platform.

This guide walks you through everything you need to stay on top of your replies: how you get notified when someone responds, where to find your conversations, how to read a thread, and how to send a reply that lands in the same conversation. Let’s make sure no response slips through the cracks.

The three places replies show up

As a student, you’ll see them in three spots, and it helps to know what each one is for:

• Notifications appear in two different places. First, a bell icon in the upper right corner will notify you when a constituent has responded to your email. Second, if you open a Task for a constituent who has responded to an email, you’ll see a blue banner across the task.
• The Communications tab is your inbox — every conversation you’ve had, in one list.
• The Reply button is how you write back, right inside the conversation.

1. Notifications: know the moment someone replies

When a constituent responds to an email you sent, GC GO surfaces a notification so you don’t have to keep refreshing your inbox to find out.

On our Home Page, there is a bell icon in the upper right hand corner. It will let you know when a constituent has responded to your email. 

You’ll also see it as a blue banner at the top of the constituent’s task, marked with an envelope icon and the message:

Constituent has responded to an email on [date]

From the banner you can:

• Click View Details to jump straight into the conversation and read what they said.
• Click the X to dismiss the notification once you’ve handled it.

A tip on dismissing: Treat the banner like an unread flag. Leave it up until you’ve actually read and replied — then dismiss it so your remaining banners are all things that still need you.

(GC GO also notifies you when a constituent replies to a text conversation (a chat-bubble icon and “Constituent has replied to a text conversation”), so the same banner area keeps both your email and text follow-ups in view.)

 

2. The Communications tab: your email home base

Everything you’ve sent and received lives under Communications in GC GO. Open it from the Communications link in the Gift Officer menu, and you’ll land on your email page.

This is where you send and receive follow-up emails from GC GO. Emails sent through GC GO also give you data about deliverability and opens. 

Inbox and Sent

The page has two tabs:

• Inbox — replies and incoming emails from constituents.
• Sent — the emails you’ve sent out.

Unread emails show in bold, so a quick glance at your Inbox tells you what’s new.

Find a specific conversation with Filters

Click Filters to narrow the list (the button shows a count, like “Filters (2)”, when filters are active). In the Inbox Filterspanel you can filter by:

• Constituent — search by name. Results only include constituents you’ve emailed, and their emails may appear in either Inbox or Sent.
• Date range — set a From and To date.
• Email status — Read or Unread.

Set what you need and click Apply.

3. Reading a thread

Email in GC GO is organized into threads, so a back-and-forth conversation stays together instead of scattering into separate messages.

A thread shows you, at a glance:

• The participants (e.g., “John Doe (+2 others)”)
• The subject line with a reply count (e.g., “Re: Reunion gift (+3 replies)”)
• A snippet preview and the timestamp of the latest message
• An attachment icon if there are attachments, and bold text if it’s unread

Click a thread to open it. The most recent message expands automatically, while older ones stay collapsed — click any message to expand or collapse it. Want to see a message exactly as it arrived? Click View Original Email to open the raw email.

4. Replying to a constituent

Here’s the part that closes the loop.

1. Open the thread in your Inbox (or get there from a notification’s View Details link).
2. Expand the constituent’s message.
3. At the bottom of that message, click Reply.
4. GC GO opens the email page and write your message. 
5. Finalize the contact report.
6. Click Send Email.

Your reply sends from your connected email account and lands in the same thread, so the whole conversation stays in one place for you and anyone reviewing the constituent’s history.

Why the Reply button might not be there: Reply appears on incoming messages from a constituent — the ones you can respond to. You won’t see it on your own outgoing emails (there’s nothing to reply to there), so if you’re looking at a message you sent, open the constituent’s reply instead.

Log the conversation as a contact report

Constituent replies to emails aren’t automatically logged as contact reports. You can turn an email thread into a contact report right from the Communications page — no retyping, and you choose exactly which messages to include.

Add an email thread to a contact report

1. On the email page, find the thread you want to log.
2. Click the document-plus icon (a page with a +) on the right side of the thread.
3. If the thread isn’t on a contact report yet, this opens the New Contact Report window.
4. If it’s already attached to one, a small menu appears — choose Add to Contact Report to add more messages, or View Contact Report to open the existing one.
5. In the window, select the emails from the thread you want to include. (Messages already on the report can’t be re-selected — anything you add appends to the report rather than overwriting it.)
6. Next, choose if you need to make any edits, and the Finalize the Contact Report. 

The thread now lives in the constituent’s activity history as a contact report.