Skip to main content

​
Overview

WeGive email templates (in both the BeeFree editor and legacy Stripo templates) use merge tags — placeholders wrapped in double curly braces, like {{unsubscribeLink}} — that WeGive automatically replaces with real, recipient-specific values when an email is sent. This page lists the most commonly needed tags, what they resolve to, and an important timing rule that trips people up: some tags only populate on a real send, not a test send. These two tags are the ones every marketing/newsletter email should include, and the ones support most often gets asked about. Add either tag inside a text/paragraph block, typically in your footer, and WeGive replaces it with the real URL at send time.

​
Personalization tags

A few of the most common ones: Many more exist for donation totals, fundraiser/campaign links, and household/address data — if you need one that isn’t listed here and aren’t sure of the exact tag name, reach out to WeGive Support.

​
Important: “Send Test” does not resolve every tag

{{unsubscribeLink}} and {{message_view_in_browser_link}} can both fail to generate a working link when sent via the editor’s “Send Test” button — this is expected, not a bug. Here’s why:
  • {{message_view_in_browser_link}} only resolves once a message is actually sent to a real recipient, because it depends on a sent-message record (the “Outbox” entry) that only gets created on a real send. A Send Test never creates that record, so this tag has nothing to point to and will come back broken or empty.
  • {{unsubscribeLink}} depends on knowing which donor/recipient the email is going to. A Send Test may not carry that context, so the link can be malformed or empty there too.
To actually validate these two links, don’t rely on Send Test. Instead, use the normal send workflow and target only your own supporter record/email address. That creates a real Outbox entry with full recipient context, and both links will resolve correctly. If a Send Test looks broken for these two tags specifically, that alone doesn’t mean anything is wrong with your template or the platform — confirm with a real send to yourself before assuming it’s an issue. If your email template was originally built by copy-pasting HTML from a previous email platform (rather than built from scratch in BeeFree), check carefully for any hardcoded “View Online” / “View in Browser” link left over from that old platform — it can look like a normal link and easy to miss, especially if your old platform used its own hosted viewer URL (for example, a link pointing at a different domain’s own /vo/ or “view online” path) rather than a WeGive merge tag. A leftover link like this won’t be replaced by {{message_view_in_browser_link}} — it’s just static HTML, so it keeps pointing at wherever it originally pointed, and will return a broken/“File Not Found” page once the old platform account is gone. The fix is to find and remove that hardcoded link and replace it with the real {{message_view_in_browser_link}} merge tag. This is also a good moment to rebuild the template cleanly in BeeFree rather than patching around it. If your account was originally set up on the legacy Stripo editor, migrated-in templates can carry other old-platform artifacts beyond just this one link. See “Migrating from Stripo to BeeFree” and “Recreate Your Existing Branded Email Templates” for the full rebuild walkthrough.
Need help finding a specific merge tag, or troubleshooting a link that isn’t resolving? Contact WeGive Support — the kind of case this page is based on was traced in minutes once we had the actual email template and generated link to look at.