Introduction
Announcements are frequently used to welcome new program participants, remind participants that a program cohort will be ending soon, or to inform participants that something important will be happening soon within the organization.
Why it matters: Announcements enable an administrator to produce and deliver important information to program participants in bulk, in a user-friendly way. Announcements are posted to a user's homepage and can include embedded video or links. Admins also have the option to email the announcement when they create it, to ensure the communication is delivered.
To send one-off messages to a user or small subset of users, utilize the Administrator Inbox or User Views features instead.
Announcements Page
Navigation: Manage > Engagement > Announcements
From the main announcements page, you can see all currently drafted and live announcements. Statistics about live announcements are shown next to the announcement's title. If no announcements have been made in a program track yet, this page will not have the sections shown below, but will instead have a call to action for you to create a new announcement.
Creating, Drafting, and Posting Announcements
To create a new announcement, click the Create Announcement button in the upper right corner of the page.
The following page will guide you from top to bottom with the steps needed to create, draft, and publish your announcement. Check out the image below for reference.
Target audience defines who in this program track will see the announcement you are making. You can have it show to all users, only to mentors, only to mentees, or only to a select group of individuals. User views are utilized to specify different sets of participants to whom an announcement would be targeted. For more information on editing user views, check out this article.
Title: Define the purpose or intent of the announcement you are writing.
Message: Your content. You have a full set of features available in the editor here; utilize these to make your announcement eye-catching and more effective!
Add an attachment: If desired, you can choose to either directly add an attachment to your announcement using the feature, or you can add it as a link within the announcement itself—the choice is yours! You can add one attachment or a zip file with multiple attachments. Either way, file size should not exceed 10 MB.
Now that the message is ready to go, the remaining settings dictate how and when the announcement will be shared with participants:
Publish on specifies when you want the announcement to be posted. You can either publish immediately, or choose a specific date for the announcement to release.
Expires on lets you dictate when an announcement will stop showing to the target audience. You do not need to specify an expiration date for announcement if one is not needed.
Send email notifications: Optional. Choose between the following:
Immediately
As part of user digest (according to their notification setting)
Don't send
Save as draft or Post: If you are expecting to make changes to the content or would like someone else on your team to review it first, we'd recommend drafting the announcement before posting.
Editing Live Announcements
There are a few caveats to be aware of when it comes to editing live announcements:
You cannot change the target audience of a live announcement
You cannot "unpublish" or revert a live announcement back to a drafted state
If you make updates to the announcement and specify that an email notification should be sent, a system email titled "Announcement update notification" (located under the General Settings section of System Emails) will be sent to the target audience