A big part of the effectiveness of your content is knowing when to display it to your members and who exactly needs to see it. In this guide, we'll break down how you can target and schedule your content to get the most out of everything you build and share in Activate.
Targeting
Targeting's all about choosing who you want to see your content. By default, your content will always be set to go to the entire channel which you're currently on.
If you only want certain groups to see the content, uncheck the box and use the other options below:
- Target an audience: send the content to a preconfigured audience you have created.
- Target a Sub Channel: this sends the content to a specific sub channel. It's pretty uncommon—usually you'll send content from sub channels to other main channels.
- Target a tenant: send your message to a specific tenant.
- Target a team: show the content to certain teams in the property, including teams from different channels.
- Target a channel: send the content to a different channel, if you're an admin of several.
The top will always display your reach, so you can double check that the intended audience matches the selections you've made.
Scheduling events
Sometimes, the time period of an event doesn't match the time period in which you'd want to display the content. In the Info step, you can set content as an event to clear up the difference.
After you enable the toggle, enter in the start and end of the actual event—whether it's a short happy hour or a several week experience in the property.
It's great for content that's interactive. You can set up a registration period that ends before the event, or you can have a period of time to spread awareness before the event actually kicks in. And don't worry—you'll choose the publication date and time in a separate step.
Publication times
In the Publish step, you choose when you want the content to display on your channel and create the notifications that will go to your members.
The dates and times you pick will determine when the content shows up for the audience you picked. If you made an interactive post, you'll see a specific toggle:
Select the toggle and pick a date—this will be the last time that anyone can interact with the features you added to the content. For example, you might want to close registrations for an event a week before it happens.
The content timeline
We'll run through a quick example so you can see the entire timeline of a piece of content. You won't always set everything up the same way, but this timeline explores every possible option:
- First, we make a draft of a Post for a 3-day bonsai class in the building. We choose our event time, publish time, and interactive features.
- A month before the class, we publish the content. People can get information about bonsai and register for the class on the Post.
- A week before the event, we close the registration with the last interactive date. It gives us a grace period to handle payments and prepare for the material requirements for the class.
- The event runs for 3 days—people who aren't participating can see the event's still happening, and maybe even try to get on a waitlist.
- The event ends, and we unpublish the content.
There are plenty of other ways to use the event times, interactive times, and publication times to give the best experience to your members. Make sure you make a plan for your content and stick to it, so you members know what to expect when they explore the channel.