Broadcast Articles

Broadcast Articles is where you set the actual message content that you wish to notify a citizen about. The articles themselves:

a) Are linked to Broadcast Topics, which is why it makes sense to add the topics first

b) Contain all of the content for all formats of messages that will be sent I.e. Email, SMS, WhatsApp etc. are all added in one place.

The following shows all of the Broadcast Articles set up for a specific instance:

Broadcast Articles

Article Status

Note that there is a coloured icon toward the right hand side. Where all are green except one, which is grey. There are three statuses for a Broadcast:

a) Published - Green - any published articles will have notifications sent out for them when they are added.

b) Draft - Grey - these are articles being worked on and will not have a notification issued for them until they are published

c) Archived - Red - these are archived articles and will not be accessible to the public even if previously published

Article Anatomy

The following article illustrates a sample article:

The following are the various elements of note:

a) You need to give it a title

b) Your need to give it a URL (slug) which means the end part of the URL for the web version of the message

c) You need to associate it with a Broadcast Topic - this is why it makes sense to add your Broadcast Topics first.

If you need to use a new Broadcast Topic, you can add a new Broadcast Topic by clicking on the 'Add New' button inside the 'topic' section.

Note that it is possible to associate an article with one topic only.

d) One can see there is the ability to Delete an article by clicking the three dots button next to the 'Save' button.

e) One can save the article using the Save button.

f) The workflow shows the current status of the article - in this case it is 'Published'. This button can be clicked and the status changed as necessary:

g) When the status is changed you can choose to do this immediately or to schedule it at a future point:

h) There is an audit of any changes to the article logged on the right hand side too:

We will now, in the next article, cover the four sections which contain the content of the article for use in different delivery channels.

Scheduling Notification Delivery

Sometimes you might create a new article, which you do not want to be published, and therefore notifications generated until a certain time in the future.

So, when you are finishing your article instead of pressing 'Save and Publish' simply press Save.

Then change the status in the workflow bar on the right to Published:

When you have done this change the status from Draft to Published and you will be presented with the following:

Scheduling a broadcast article and its notifications for a later date

You can click the 'Now' text in the above and it will change the date/time to precise time today.