REDCap - SendGrid

REDCap has the capability to use SendGrid Dynamic Templates for sending email-based Alerts & Notifications. SendGrid Templates give you significantly more control over the style and design of your emails when compared to the standard email alert type. Enabling this feature will give you another alert type to choose from on the Alerts & Notifications page called SendGrid Template.

SETUP & CONFIGURATION: This integration requires that you have an account setup on sendgrid.com. After creating a SendGrid account, you'll need to configure senders for the account, create the dynamic templates you wish to use for REDCap alerts, and generate an API Key with appropriate permissions for REDCap to use. When configuring senders on your SendGrid account, you may specify individual senders, authenticate an entire domain so that any email address associated with that domain may be a sender, or both. Please refer to SendGrid's documentation on how to set up Domain Authentication and how to add individual Verified Senders. To create a dynamic template in your SendGrid account, login to your SendGrid account and use the sidebar to navigate to Email API→Dynamic Templates. Here you can create a dynamic template, give it a name, and associate an email design with it. Please reference SendGrid's documentation on Dynamic Templatesand Handlebars to learn more about creating templates in your SendGrid account. Lastly, to create an API Key for REDCap, login to your SendGrid account and use the sidebar to navigate to Settings→API Keys. Here you can create a new API Key and specify its permissions. It is recommended that you create a Restricted Access API Key and only give the API Key the permissions REDCap needs to function. REDCap will need Full Access to Mail Send, Read Access to Sender Authentication, Read Access to Template Engine, and Read Access to Unsubscribe Groups in the Suppression section. Once you have your API Key, you may use it to configure SendGrid Template email services for alerts & notifications through the REDCap Project Setup page.

ALERTS & NOTIFICATIONS: The SendGrid alert type will allow you to specify a sender email address that's in your SendGrid account's list of Verified Senders or an email address that matches an Authenticated Domain associated with your SendGrid account. You'll also have an interface to choose which of your SendGrid account's dynamic templates you'd like to use for the alert as well as an interface to specify key/value pairs that will be used to populate your template with REDCap data. Lastly, choosing recipients for SendGrid alerts works the same way as choosing recipients for email alerts.

COST: As REDCap makes API calls to SendGrid's Email API using your account's API Key, your SendGrid account will keep track of REDCap's usage and your SendGrid account will be charged accordingly. This is not done by REDCap but is done internally by SendGrid as you use its services. In this way, no monetary transactions are made by REDCap, and thus it is your responsibility to maintain the funds in your SendGrid account in order to ensure that the service continues to work for your REDCap project. If your SendGrid account runs out of funds, the SendGrid services in REDCap will cease to function. You may reference SendGrid's pricing page to get their latest pricing.