These instructions assume you have purchased a domain name.
I followed the instructions in this article. You don't need the seciton on sending from personal emails, but do need the section sending from a domain (that you've purchased).
When you have set up a domain in SES, you need to ensure you have selected "publish to Route 53" so that the details (DKIM) get added to the relevant domain name. You don't need to set up the Custom MAIL FROM domain unless you want to (allows you to send from abc.yourdomain), if you do, ensure you publish those credentials to Route 53.
To include it in the admin for select models, I created a mixin which expands the save_model function and added the mixin to the admin models. This way, whenever the model is saved in the admin, the researchers should be notified. I also opted to use a template for the html message rather than plain text.
You can view the code for the mixin and the email template