Managing announcements

This guide covers creating, scheduling, and publishing announcements for your changelog.

Creating an announcement

1. Go to Announcements
2. Click New announcement
3. Enter a title
4. Write your content (supports rich text formatting)
5. Select a category
6. Click Save as draft or Publish

Announcement categories

Categories help organise your changelog. Default categories:

Customising categories

1. Go to Settings > Categories
2. Add new categories with custom names and colours
3. Edit or delete existing categories
4. Reorder categories by dragging

Publishing announcements

When you're ready to share your announcement:

1. Open the draft announcement
2. Review the content
3. Click Publish

Published announcements:

• Become visible to users immediately
• Cannot be edited (except pinning)
• Show the publish date in your changelog

Scheduling announcements

To publish at a future time:

1. Create your announcement
2. Instead of Publish, click Schedule
3. Select the date and time
4. Click Confirm

The announcement will automatically publish at the scheduled time.

Editing announcements

Draft announcements

Drafts can be freely edited until published.

Published announcements

Published announcements cannot be edited to maintain changelog integrity. To make changes:

1. Have an Admin unpublish the announcement
2. The announcement reverts to draft status
3. Make your edits
4. Republish when ready

Pinning announcements

Pinned announcements appear at the top of your changelog:

1. Open an announcement
2. Click the Pin button
3. The announcement moves to the top

To unpin, click Unpin on a pinned announcement.

User reactions

Users can react to announcements to show their sentiment:

• 👍 Like
• ❤️ Love
• 🎉 Celebrate
• 🤔 Thinking
• 😢 Sad

Each user can have one reaction per announcement. Reactions help you gauge how updates are received.

Notification subscriptions

Users can subscribe to receive notifications when you publish announcements:

How users subscribe

1. User visits your changelog
2. Clicks Subscribe
3. Chooses to receive all announcements or specific categories

Sending notifications

When you publish an announcement:

1. Select which segment to notify (or "All users")
2. Subscribed users in that segment receive email notifications
3. Notifications respect users' email preferences

Best practices

Writing effective announcements

• Be specific: Describe what changed and why it matters
• Show value: Explain how users benefit
• Use visuals: Include screenshots or GIFs when helpful
• Link to docs: Point to detailed documentation if available

Categorising consistently

• Use New feature for functionality that didn't exist before
• Use Improvement for enhancements to existing features
• Use Bug fix only for resolved issues
• Use Announcement for general updates like maintenance notices

Next steps

• Managing surveys - Collect feedback on your announcements
• User segments - Target notifications to specific users