Announcements

Announcements let you broadcast updates to everyone registered for an event, or a precisely filtered slice of them. Each announcement appears immediately in the attendee's portal, and you can layer email and SMS delivery on top for registrants who have given the appropriate consent.

Open the event, then go to Announcements, under Communication in the sidebar.

Starting a message

Select New message at the top of the tab. It opens a chooser with two options: Announcement, a quick post covered by this article, or Designed email, which opens a fully designed, audience-built email in Marketing's composer, in a new tab.

Creating an announcement

Choosing Announcement opens the New announcement form. Every announcement has four main fields:

• Title: required, up to 200 characters. Shown as the announcement heading in the portal and in the email/SMS subject line.
• Body: required, up to 8,000 characters. Plain text; newlines are preserved when rendered.
• Channels: Email, SMS, or both. Controls which channels the dispatcher attempts at send time.
• Type: Transactional or Marketing. Determines which consent tier is required. See Transactional vs marketing below.

Audience targeting

Expand the Audience filter panel to narrow who receives the announcement. You can filter on up to five axes at once. Registration status is a fixed set of checkboxes; the other four are multi-select checkbox groups built from this event's own data, and each one is hidden entirely when the event has none of that thing (no price tiers, no sessions, and so on).

• Registration status: Confirmed, Pending, Awaiting approval, or Waitlisted. Defaults to Confirmed only.
• Ticket types: select one or more; leave empty to include all.
• Price tiers: select one or more; leave empty to include all.
• Registration paths: select one or more; leave empty to include all.
• Enrolled in sessions: any active RSVP to one or more of the selected sessions; leave empty to include all.

Leaving any axis empty includes everyone on that axis, an empty ticket-types filter is not "no one," it's "all ticket types." Selecting more than one option within an axis is an OR (any of the selected values match); the axes themselves combine as AND, so Confirmed status plus a specific ticket type only reaches confirmed holders of that ticket type.

The audience filter controls, and the preview below, are only active while Send now is on. A draft doesn't resolve an audience yet, so there's nothing to filter or preview until you're ready to send.

The Audience preview panel updates automatically as you adjust filters, there's a 400ms debounce so it doesn't fetch on every click. It shows the total matched registrant count, how many will receive via email, how many via SMS, and how many will be skipped because they have no consented channel. Expand the preview list to see up to 25 names with their resolved contact and channel.

Transactional vs marketing

The Type field controls which consent tier Events checks before delivering the announcement to each recipient.

Transactional announcements cover event updates, schedule changes, and emergencies. They bypass marketing consent, a registrant who opted out of marketing emails will still receive a transactional announcement. Use this type for information that directly relates to an event they are registered for.

Marketing announcements cover promotions, future events, and newsletters. They require explicit marketing consent on the channel being used. Registrants without that consent are counted in the skipped total in the audience preview.

The consent notes shown beneath the Type field are informational, they reflect what the dispatcher will enforce per recipient at send time.

Email and SMS together

When you select both Email and SMS, the dispatcher uses an SMS-first-then-email logic per recipient, not both channels at once. Each recipient gets one message:

• If the recipient has SMS consent and a verified phone number, they receive an SMS.
• If the recipient is not SMS-eligible, they receive an email instead (if they have the relevant email consent).
• If neither channel is available, the recipient is skipped, they appear in the skipped count in the audience preview.

Selecting both channels does not send two messages to a recipient who is reachable on both. The audience preview's email and SMS counts are mutually exclusive, they always add up to the total reached.

When SMS is selected, a Test send panel appears in the form. Enter any phone number in E.164 format (e.g. +15551234567) to send the current title and body to that number immediately. The test send bypasses consent gates and does not create a recipient row, it's a smoke test for the SMS pipeline before you publish.

Drafts vs send now

The Send now toggle at the bottom of the form controls what happens on submit:

• Send now ON: the announcement is published and dispatch to email/SMS begins immediately. The form requires at least one channel to be selected before it will submit.
• Send now OFF: the announcement is saved as a draft. No channel is required. Drafts appear in the posted announcements list but are not visible to attendees in the portal and are not delivered via email or SMS.

What attendees see

Every published announcement appears in the attendee's portal in chronological order. Attendees see all published announcements for the event regardless of which channel was used to deliver them, the portal is the canonical record.

Email and SMS are delivered on top of the portal record based on each attendee's consent and the channel selection you made. An attendee who did not receive an SMS or email (because they lacked consent) can still read the announcement in their portal.

In the posted announcements list on the operator tab, each card shows whether the announcement was emailed, texted, or both, displayed as Published · Emailed, Published · Texted, or Published · Emailed + Texted. Drafts show Draft with no delivery stamps.