Overview
Creating a New Broadcast
You can create a new Broadcast directly from the left-hand menu, or from a Survey.
From the home screen, click on the Broadcast icon to see the Create New Broadcast option:
If you don’t see the icon, you may not have Broadcasts enabled for your Ardoq organization - get in touch with us via in-app chat or talk to your Customer Success Manager.
You can also create a new Broadcast directly from a Survey. Once the Survey is set to ‘Live,’ the Broadcast menu will be enabled:
Choosing the Create Broadcast option will take you to the Broadcast builder page.
Setting the Content and Filter Rules
The first step in building your Broadcast is to define what it is you want to send and which conditions you want to send it under.
Choose whether you want to Broadcast a Survey or a Message.
Surveys are for collecting information from your audience.
Messages are for alerting or informing your audience of something.
If you’ve created your Broadcast directly from a Survey, these fields will be pre-selected.
If you choose a Survey, you don’t need to specify the Workspace or Component Type (that’s inherited from the Survey). For a Message, you will.
Next, specify the filter rules that will determine which components you want to include in each Broadcast. If you only want to send out particular Surveys, or send a Message under certain conditions, then you need filter rules.
Note: If you want your Broadcast to include every existing entry in your Survey, or every instance of the component type you’ve selected as your Message scope, you can skip this stage altogether.
For both Surveys and Messages, you can specify rules based directly on components’ data using Advanced Search. For example, components with a specific list property value, or a date value that falls within a given time period.
You can also specify rules based on components' references and trigger a broadcast when a reference is changed or updated.
For Surveys, you can also specify filter rules that apply to the Survey itself - for example, Surveys that are incomplete, or that haven’t been updated in a certain period of time.
You can combine multiple filter rules to create highly specific Broadcasts.
Once you’ve defined your rules you can test them by using the component preview window.
Sometimes after defining your filter rules, you’ll open the component preview window only to find it’s empty. 😟
This doesn’t mean your rules are invalid, but it highlights an important feature of Broadcasts: The component and audience previews always represent the current state of the data. 💡
For example, if you’ve set up a filter condition that looks for Projects created in the past week, and no projects have been created in that time, then the component preview window will be empty, as will the audience preview if you’re using a graph query.
Building the Audience
Broadcasts provides a range of audience-targeting options, from simple to sophisticated, so it’s important to understand which options to use to reach the people you want to reach.
There are four different ways of building an audience for a Broadcasts:
Using a group or individual email address.
Using a selection from a People workspace in Ardoq.
Using a predefined graph query.
Using a Gremlin graph query.
To read more about the advantages of each option, see Broadcasts: How to use intelligent audience targeting.
The important thing to understand here is that you can add multiple audiences to your Broadcast using the Add Audience function. This gives you a huge amount of flexibility in how you target the right people and groups.
Each time you add an audience, it will add a chip to your audience selection showing you how many people or addresses are in each group.
You can edit an audience by clicking on the chip, and delete it by clicking on the ‘X’.
Adding the audience is straightforward. For email and People Workspace options you can directly see who will receive your Broadcast.
For Predefined and Gremlin query audience options which both use rules rather than direct selection of people, you can preview the audience before you send using the Audience Preview.
When you combine multiple audience types, the same people may be added multiple times. Broadcasts will show you who has been added from which selection in the audience preview page and will de-duplicate the list so the same person doesn’t receive multiple messages about the same thing.
Building the Message
Broadcasts provides a lot of flexibility for building the message you’ll send to your audience. As with the other steps, you can choose between creating something generic or something highly targeted.
You can type a free-text message subject and message body using the message editor. It also provides a rich text editor allowing you to add formatting to your message.
The rich text editor is especially useful in that you can also send hyperlinks to other Ardoq assets (e.g. presentations) or other relevant content resources (e.g. Confluence or Intranet pages).
Note: Please be aware of your organization’s security policies here to ensure your Broadcast isn’t misidentified as a phishing attempt!
One of the restrictions from the mail providers' side is that they don't support the Data URL (starts with "data:") and the SVG format. This means if you want to display the logo in the emails, you must use a normal ("https:") URL here, and you cannot use SVG format.
You can also use message parameters to personalize your message and make it more relevant for each audience member. Parameters include the audience name (not available for the email audience type), survey name, workspace name, and more.
Parameters can be inserted at any point in the message and will be resolved at the time the Broadcast is sent out.
To preview how the finished message will appear to your audience, you can send a Broadcast to yourself or to a colleague before you publish it - see Testing, Running, and Troubleshooting Broadcasts. Note: You can’t change the email address, you can only change the display name of the email.
Setting the Landing Page
The next step is to determine where the links in your Broadcast message will take your audience to. This option only applies to Surveys and you only have a choice when you’re using Predefined or Gremlin query audience types.
If you select the searchable overview page option, then each recipient will get an email with a single link that takes them to a personalized and searchable landing page where they can see all the surveys they need to complete for this Broadcast.
If you select the direct links to each survey option, then each recipient will get an email with a list of links that will take them directly to each survey they need to complete.
Please keep in mind that the content that cannot be manually edited by the admins has a gray background in the broadcast email, while content that can be edited by the Ardoq admin has a transparent background.
Setting the Scheduler
Broadcasts can be one-time or repeatable and can be scheduled to run right away or at some point in the future.
The scheduler enables you to set the start date and - for a repeating Broadcast - the frequency as well as an optional end date. This gives you a lot of flexibility in when and how often your Broadcasts run.
You can also send reminders to follow up with people if they haven’t responded to your first message. Two things to be aware of:
Unlike first-time Broadcast components and audiences which are recalculated for each Broadcast run, reminders are based on the components and audience at the time of the original broadcast they relate to and not the current date.
For Surveys, reminders are only sent to people who haven’t submitted a survey response.
Note: The broadcast reminder is initiated from the scheduled time of the broadcast plus the reminder wait interval.
This means that if you set a Broadcast to run weekly with a reminder after seven days, then it will send out two messages in the second week:
a) the second week’s Broadcast,
b) the reminder for the first week’s Broadcast. Both may contain different components and have different audiences.
The other important thing to understand about the scheduler is that it will only send out a Broadcast if it has components and an audience to Broadcast to.
Because both of these are determined by rules, for some runs of the scheduler there may be nothing to Broadcast.
For more information on working with the scheduler see Working with Timing in Broadcasts.
🆕 Broadcast message builder now has a dedicated button to Add a Presentation. Previously, one had to manually open the right Presentation from Home or Presentations then copy its URL into the message body. It even has a handy warning to alert you if the Presentation's permissions may not match those of the Broadcast's audience.
