Writing a message

Personalisation

You can send personalised messages by adding personalisation fields to a single template.

Use double brackets to add a personalisation field to your content. Do not include spaces in your personalisation fields. For example:

Information:

Hello ((fullName)), your NHS Number is ((nhsNumber))

You can use:

You can see personalisation instructions while you’re editing a template.

Personal Demographics Service (PDS) personalisation fields

NHS Notify uses the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) to find and populate certain personalisation fields for each recipient. This happens automatically when you tell us who you want to message using recipients’ NHS numbers.

To use PDS personalisation fields in your templates, choose from the following list:

  • fullName
  • firstName
  • lastName
  • nhsNumber
  • date
Information:

Make sure your personalisation fields exactly match the PDS personalisation fields. This includes using the correct order of upper and lower case letters.

Custom personalisation fields

You can add custom personalisation fields that use your own personalisation data.

If you’re using NHS Notify API

Include a personalisation block in your API request.

For example, if you wanted to include ‘practice’ as a personalisation field, the personalisation block would be:

Information:

“practice”: “PRACTICE_NAME”,

Read the API documentation to find out where to put this in your request.

If you’re using NHS Notify MESH

Include the personalisation fields as columns in your CSV file.

The column names should start with ‘personalisation_’, followed by the same wording as the personalisation fields in your template.

For example, if you wanted to include ‘practice’ as a personalisation field, the column name would be:

Information:

nhsNumber,requestItemRefId,personalisation_practice

Providing example data

The data used in your personalisation fields can affect the formatting and length of your messages. This could make some messages cost more than expected.

You need to give us example data if you use custom personalisation. This helps us show you what your templates will look like with different lengths of data in your personalisation fields.

Download and fill in our example personalisation data spreadsheet.

The personalisation fields in your message content must match the fields in the ‘personalisation field’ column of your spreadsheet.

For each personalisation field, you need to provide examples that are:

  • short
  • medium
  • long

For example, if you had ((hospital_address_line)) as a personalisation field, you might choose the following example data:

Information:
  • Hospital A (short)
  • Hospital ABCDE (medium)
  • Hospital ABCDEFGHIJKLMN (long)

You can decide how many characters to use for each length.

If the information for a field will always be the same length, give us 3 different examples that are all that same length.

Your example data does not need to be real data.

Fields to avoid for custom personalisation

If you want to use custom personalisation, do not use the following personalisation fields:

  • PDS personalisation fields
  • emailAddress
  • phoneNumber
  • addressLine1
  • addressLine2
  • addressLine3
  • addressLine4
  • addressLine5
  • addressLine6
  • addressLine7
  • middleNames
  • namePrefix
  • nameSuffix
  • date
  • clientRef
  • recipientContactValue
  • template
Information:

Custom personalisation will not work if you use these fields. This includes any variations, for example, if you add spaces, punctuation, and upper or lower case letters.

You can include extra words in your custom personalisation fields to make them different.

For example, if you wanted to include GP practice phone number, your personalisation field could be:

Information:

((GP_phoneNumber))