Announcements are a very handy part of your toolkit when running any challenge. Not only do they help disseminate the challenge to your audience base, but they also keep users in-the-loop as they engage with the challenge and take part in the challenge’s lifecycle.

In this article, we explain how to set up and manage your challenge’s announcements. Announcements form a key part of your engagement plan, which we’ll cover in more detail in the next article.

1. Find the Announcements Settings Page

Firstly, navigate to the Settings page of your challenge. Find your challenge via the “Challenges” link in the top navbar, and then select “View challenge”.

From here, click the “Settings” button in the challenge toolbar.

Finally, tap the “Announcements” tab in the sidebar.

2. Create a New Announcement

Once on the “Announcements” settings page, as described in section 1 above, click the “New announcement” button to set up a new announcement.

This will open up a window and ask you if you want to create a “Standard” or “Automatic” announcement.

2.1. Create a Standard Announcement

A “standard” announcement is a bulk message that targets a set of users that you define. It can be sent immediately or scheduled for a future date and time.

To begin, select “Standard” as the “Announcement type”.

Build a recipient list

The first task is to create a recipient list that this announcement will be sent to. In the “Recipient list” section, use the “Add condition” button to add rules that define the intended recipients.

All conditions are additive, such that recipients must fulfil all the criteria in order to receive the announcement message. If you need to target distinct sets of recipients, we recommend making a copy of the announcement, and then tweaking it, once it’s been sent.

In the above example, the announcement will target all users that have started an idea for your challenge and who have been tagged with the “Engineering and manufacturing” tag.

You can sense-test your conditions by observing the “This announcement will be sent to X users” line.

Please note that if you schedule your message for the future, the expected recipient count number might be different by the time the message is actually sent. This is because the recipient list is resolved at send-time.

2.2. Create an Automatic Announcement

An “automatic” announcement is a message that you configure to send to a single recipient when they carry out a specific action.

To begin, select “Automatic” as the “Announcement type”.

Configure the automation rule

The first task is to choose when you want your automatic message to be sent. To do so, choose an option from the “Send announcement when…” dropdown and make any configurations as needed.

In the example above, the automatic announcement would be sent to a user when they submit their idea.

2.3. Configure Your Announcement

Now you have chosen what type of announcement you want to send, and who or why it should be sent, you can begin to customise the content and other useful information.

Write your announcement content

Your next task is to build the content of the announcement message itself. By default, announcements are sent via email, and you can configure both the subject line and message body of your announcement.

You are free to write your subject and message in any way you need, given your intended recipients.

You can customise your subject and message using placeholders for the recipient’s first and last name. For example, the text {firstName} will be replaced by the recipient’s first name when the message is sent.

You can use simple rich text formatting for your message.

Manage announcement settings

In the “Settings” area, you can control:

• Reply-to address: an email address that is used by email recipients when they click the “reply” button in their email client. This is useful to configure because the announcement is usually sent from an address that doesn’t typically handle incoming email.

• Call-to-action: you can configure the CTA included at the bottom of your announcement. Here you can control the text shown on the CTA button, as well as the URL. A small preview is displayed.

Add attachments

Announcements can include file attachments, which are included as attachments in the announcement email sent to recipients.

To add attachments, simply drag and drop them into the attachments area.

Important note: Please ensure that your total attachment file size is not too large to be sent via email. Different mail systems have different limits, but a general rule is to keep things less than 10MB in total. This helps to ensure maximum compatibility.

Add a calendar event

SimplyDo announcements can include calendar events. These allow you to send out meeting invitations that can be automatically added to recipients’ calendars. This can be useful for inviting idea creators or assessors to meetings, or for advertising webinars and other scheduled events.

To do so, fill in the relevant information in the “Calendar event” section.

Standard announcements: Choose when to send your message

By default, standard announcements are sent immediately. You can instead schedule your message to be sent in the future by toggling on the “Schedule this announcement to be sent at a later date” control in the “Send when” area.

When this is toggled, you can provide a date and time to send the announcement. You can click the “Send on ” button to complete the announcement setup, and SimplyDo will automatically schedule your message. You can come back to edit your announcement, including the scheduled send date, at any time before it is sent.

If you don’t toggle this option on, the announcement will be sent immediately.

Automatic announcements: Complete creation

For automatic announcements, simply click the “Create announcement” button to finish.

You can return to edit your automatic announcement, or delete it, at any time.

3. Import Announcements

If you’ve run a challenge before, and want to copy the announcements you previously used, you can import them into your challenge.

To do so, navigate to the challenge’s announcements settings page, as described in section 1 above, and then tap the “Copy from another challenge” button.

A window will be displayed, inviting you to select another challenge. Tick the checkbox next to the challenge from which you wish to import the announcements, and then click the “Copy from this challenge” button. If you have lots of previous challenges, you can use the search box to find a specific challenge.

Once completed, all of the automatic announcements from the source challenge will be added to your challenge. You can then safely make edits to the imported announcements without affecting the original challenge.

4. Edit an Announcement

You can make changes to automatic announcements at any time, and to scheduled standard announcements that haven’t yet been sent.

To do so, click the “Edit” button next to the announcement you want to change.

This will open the usual creation window covered in section 2 above, and you can click the “Save changes” button to complete your edit.

5. Copy an Announcement

You can make a copy of a previously-created announcement. For example, this may be useful if you want to send a few similar scheduled “reminders” during a challenge lifecycle, or if you want to re-send a previous standard announcement at a later date.

To copy an announcement, first click the “Edit” button next to the announcement you want to change.

This will open the usual creation window covered in section 2 above, and you can click the “Copy to new” button to make a copy of the announcement.

Once copied, you will be presented with a window allowing you to complete the setup of the new announcement. You can make changes to the copy without affecting the original.

6. Delete an Announcement

You can delete automatic announcements and unsent scheduled standard announcements.

To do so, click the “Edit” button next to the announcement you want to change.

This will open the usual creation window covered in section 2 above, and you can click the “Delete” button to delete the announcement.

Once deleted, the announcement will no longer send at its scheduled time or trigger action.

7. View Announcement Logs

SimplyDo maintains a log of sent announcements. This enables you to keep track of what people have received.

To view the announcement log, navigate to the announcements settings page for your challenge, as described in section 1 above.

On this page, tap the “View delivery logs” button to expand the logs table.

Browse the announcement logs

Once expanded, you can view a chronological timeline of announcements (both automatic and standard) sent for this challenge, with the most recent at the top. For each message, we show the date and time, the message subject and its recipient(s).

In some cases, we also provide a delivered, bounced, and opened status indication, though this is not available for organisations using custom outbound mail servers.

Filter and search for messages

The Filter controls enable you to filter announcement logs by the type of announcement sent, and you can use the input box to type a recipient in order to surface specific messages.

View detailed information

More detailed information about a specific log entry can be found by tapping the View button on the entry of interest.

This will open a pane and display further information about the entry.

In this example, we can see that the message was sent due to it being an automatic message triggered to send when someone creates a new idea.