Inform your users by sending announcements

With the Announcements feature, you can send notifications and share in-depth updates with your users instantly. Of course, you can also spread recognition and coaching love, but we recommend you use it just for sending valuable information. This information can include rich text and Showpad content. It's automatically pushed out, and users won’t need to update the content to see the message.

If users have push notifications enabled on their device, your announcement will appear on their device, even when they are not inside the Showpad app. Do not worry about waking up sales reps working across different time zones. You can share the announcements on their local time.

See how it works

Key features

• Send important announcements and add Showpad content
• Send email notifications
• Share elaborate updates with your sales reps at their local time
• Users receive the notification even when they're not in the Showpad app
• Use the rich text editor to style your text
• See an overview of sent, scheduled, and archived announcements
• See how many % of users read your announcement

You need this to succeed

• Administrator access or promoted member permissions related to announcements
• A valuable announcement to send
• .gifs are not support on iOS announcements 

The quick way to awesomeness

1. Navigate to the Announcements tab under Collaboration
2. Write the message to your users
3. Schedule the message if you prefer
4. Publish
5. Check the Insights to see who received and opened the announcement

Do this step by step

1. Click Collaboration in the top menu.
2. Click the Announcements tab and then New Announcement.
3. Enter a subject in the announcement.
4. Edit the text with the rich text editor. You can add bold, italic text and create a list.
   

   Note: If you include a longer string of text, such as a URL, when the announcement is opened on Outlook it will appear wider and become horizontally scrollable for users, without text wrapping. This ensures the format is easy to read and words don't get cut off.

   
5. To add an image, click the Picture icon. Click upload image and select a .jpeg, .png, or .gif from your device, or add an image URL. Once you're done, click Insert Image. You can add multiple images, each up to 10mb. GIFs are not support on iOS announcements. 
6. Add Showpad content in the announcement. Click Insert Content and select or search the content you want to add.
   Keep in mind the users will need to have access to that particular content. Available content to add will be assets used in a Page, Experience, or Homepage. Coach content is not available to add to announcements.
   
7. Once you've checked the content you want, click Insert items. The links to the content will be added automatically.
8. Send the announcement to the selected users. You can select All users, Selected Experiences, or User Groups. When choosing an Experience, the announcement will be went to all users assigned to that Experience.
   
   

   Note: When you use divisions and you send an announcement to all users, all user groups in all divisions will receive your message. Select the corresponding user group if you want to send an announcement to a certain division.

9. If required, select the Request User to update content check box. This is useful when you want to add extra emphasis on your request for users to update their content on a Showpad mobile app or the Windows Desktop app.
   When selected, the announcement will include an action button for the user to click, which will update their assets. See the screenshot below for an example of what users will be prompted.
10. Notify users by email to avoid delays and that they will receive the message if the notification was not delivered. Your email address needs to exist on your company domain since that's the address used for user replies.
    Just like normal emails, you receive out of office email replies when users are not available.
11. If required, set the date and time on which the announcement should be sent. Those announcements will appear in the Scheduled view.

    Note: The timezone of your system is used when creating a scheduled announcement. If you set an announcement at 10 am tomorrow, it goes out at 10 am, relative to your system settings.

12. When you’re ready, click the Send button.
    
    

    Note: Keep in mind that a push-notification can only view around 110 characters. When writing your announcement be sure to start with a subject, which gives an overall idea about what your announcement is about.

13. For your users, the announcement will look like this. (Showpad's Web app in this example.)
    
14. Clicking an announcement opens up the announcement details.
    
15. You can archive announcements by clicking Archive.
    
16. For your users, the announcement will show up on their devices and when selected, via email. A link to view the content in our Web app is automatically included.
    
17. In the Announcements screen, you can see the percentage of users that opened the announcement. This percentage is calculated like this: if you send out an announcement to 10 users, and it will result in a read percentage of 60%.
    • 2 users open the email and click on the 'View in Showpad' button
    • 1 user taps the announcement on his iPad.
    • 3 users click on the announcement in the Web app

To edit or archive an Announcement, click its row to select it then scroll to the right. Choose Edit or Archive. Only Announcements in the Scheduled tab can be edited. Archived Announcements will be moved to the Archived tab.