Send personalized messages to collect and distribute information right from the Ardoq platform. With Broadcasts, you can automatically reach the right people, at the right time based on your data.

Table of Contents:

Broadcasts is Ardoq’s highly-configurable automated messaging platform. With Broadcasts, Ardoq administrators can send a:

Broadcasts can send out everything from mass-mails inviting your whole organization to contribute to a survey to micro-targeted personalized alerts and reminders only sent under specific conditions.

There are multiple ways to access the Broadcast Builder:

From the Home page, click on the Broadcasts 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.

You can create a broadcast from the Report Reader.

👉 Find out more about Report alert broadcast in this KB article.

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, message, or a report alert from the Content type dropdown.

If you’ve created your broadcast directly from a survey or a report, the content type and survey or report will be pre-selected.

If you choose Survey in content type, you don’t need to specify the Workspace or Component Type (that’s inherited from the survey). For a Message, you will.

Next, tick the “Add filter rules” checkbox right to specify the filter rules that will determine:

If you want to send out surveys or 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 targeted broadcasts.

Once you’ve defined your rules you can test them by using the component preview window.

If the preview shows no results, this means there are currently no components or references that match the rules defined. 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.

After selecting Report alert in the Content type dropdown and the report you want to be notified about, set up rules to trigger the broadcast. Define a value for:

Click on the “Add audience” button to define who should receive the broadcast. There are four different ways of building an audience for a broadcast:

👉 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. To learn more about the advantages of each option, see Broadcasts: How to use intelligent audience targeting.

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’.

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 deduplicate the list so the same person doesn’t receive the same broadcasts more than once.

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.

👉 Note: You can’t change the email address, you can only change the display name of the email.

Broadcast message builder also has a dedicated button to "Add a Presentation" and a handy warning to alert you if the presentation's permissions may not match those of the Broadcast's audience.

You can preview how the finished message will appear to your audience by clicking on the Preview button at the top right corner of the broadcast page. From the list of the audience select one person to see how this broadcast message will look like in their inbox.

The next step is to determine where the links in your Survey and Report Alert broadcast will take your audience to.

You can only define the landing page for a survey broadcast when using Predefined people graph query 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.

Decide whether your user should open the report in core Ardoq or Discover. Choose:

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:

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:

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.

Note: The reminders will be sent at the same time of day as the original broadcast.

After you finish setting up the broadcast, it’s time to test it.

Navigate to the top right corner of the broadcast page and click the “Preview” button.

Click on it and select a specific person from the predefined audience to see the email this person will receive after you click “Launch Broadcast.”

Please keep in mind that the broadcast will not be launched until one hour after you set it up.

If you’d like to launch it immediately, go to the broadcast overview page, find the broadcast you want to launch, click on the three dots menu > Send now.

From the context menu, you can trigger either unpublished or running broadcasts for a one-off run, or launch them. You can also edit, rename, copy and delete broadcasts from here.

Editing a published Broadcast will set it to unpublished and you’ll need to Launch it again. This is to prevent accidental changes from being made to running broadcasts.

The summary page also shows you if there’s a problem with your broadcasts through warnings or errors.

A broadcast with one or more warnings will continue to run but may not behave as intended; a broadcast with errors will be paused as it non longer has all the elements it needs to run - for example, its survey or underlying workspace has been deleted.

In either case, the broadcast builder will show you exactly where the problems are so you can get your broadcast up and running again.

The Broadcast Overview provides a summary of all your current Broadcasts. Here you can see their status, latest schedule, and the history of individual Broadcasts.

Clicking on the name of a published (status “running” or “done”) broadcast shows you its summary. Doing the same for an unpublished broadcast takes you directly to the broadcast Builder.

For the broadcast with surveys, as the next step, you can create a dashboard that will help you get an overview on the completion of the survey and contribution from the recipients. Also, you can receive daily notifications about changes done by the contributors to a specific email.
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​FAQ: To select an audience using the People workspace, the workspace needs to use the Person component type and have the Contact Email field applied.

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If you still have questions or need more information, browse our Knowledge Base, or reach out to us via our website or by using the in-app chat.