GOV.UK Notify Templates

GOV.UK Notify is the ideal method to send your notifications, as it provides a consistent and proven notification service that can scale well beyond anything a council may need to do.

Plus, the cost of sending text messages is reduced by virtue of councils being eligible for 25,000 free text messages (per service) per annum.

It's for these reasons we have built in a simple method to link Broadcast to your GOV.UK Notify templates.

Like other things we've added you simply need to click the 'New' button in the top right to add a new template that you want to link to.

Note

In the above we have added one GOV.UK Notify Template for email and one for SMS (Text Messages). This is purely for simplicity of explanation. You can have as many different GOV.UK Notify templates as you like.

However, the way Broadcast works is the body of the message sent is configured in the 'Broadcast Article'. So technically one only actually needs one of each because the body is dynamically added based upon what's in the Broadcast Article.

Read more about Broadcast Articles here.

Adding the template id

After you have pressed the 'New' button you will then be presented with the following:

The name can be anything you like but obviously it makes sense to state whether it is an email or text message template given that is not logged here.

To get the template-id you need to access your GOV.UK Notify account. Select the template you intend to use and below it you will see the Template ID. In this case it relates to a text message template.

GOV.UK Notify Template

Note that the body of the text message is simply ((message)).

This is because the actual body of the 'message' will be contained with the set up for the Broadcast Article.

All you need to do is copy that Template ID and give your template a name:

Adding the template id and name to a Broadcast GOV.UK Notify template

Once this is done for both email and SMS - it will then be possible to send notifications via the GOV.UK channels.

You don't need to use both email and SMS. You might decide to only use GOV.UK Notify for text messages for example.