Announcements are a core component of every LaunchNotes project. They power your ability to create, publish, and notify your users of product updates and changes.
Typically, announcements are created to communicate any product change (or group of changes) that modifies the product or user experience. The range of announcement types can include Tier-1 feature release that can drive new business, functionality enhancements, bug fixes, weekly and monthly roundups of product development progress, and more.
This article will cover the following:
Creating a new announcement
To create a new announcement, select the + New Draft button in the top right corner.
Other options for starting a new announcement include drafting from a pre-recorded Loom video, from pasted content, or from a template saved in your team’s account:
Step 1. Draft announcement
You'll be taken to the Draft announcement screen, to build all the content related to your announcement:
Title
Hero image or Loom
Content (including rich text, images, gifs, videos, etc.).
Associated categories and labels, roadmap items, and cohorts
Notification settings (enabled or disabled, with customizable email subject line and option for excerpt-only emails)
Excerpt (created automatically from content, optionally customizable)
Advanced share settings including the URL slug, page and share title, meta description, share image, and do not index option
Links
Author name override
Confluence option, with the ability to cross publish to your team’s space
At any time, you can preview this draft announcement in a separate tab to see what your product update will look like on your public or private LaunchNotes page.
When notifications are enabled, you can send a test email to up to 5 email addresses at a time.
Note: All changes are auto-saved in the editor in case you close this window unintentionally.
Hero images
The announcement hero is the image or Loom video at the top of a LaunchNotes product announcement and will appear at the top of an email notification and on the LaunchNotes page.
❗ JPG's, PNG's and GIF's are currently supported, with a max file size of 5MB, and a recommended aspect ratio of 5:3. For best quality, upload images with a width of 1640px.
Excerpt
The excerpt on your announcement is a short preview shown under each announcement headline on the announcements page, as well as in the email preheader and Slack notification (if you are using the Slack Channels integration). The text auto-generates the first 200 characters of your announcement body, where it will then be appended by an ellipsis ("...").
You can override the auto-generated excerpt by toggling on ‘Customize excerpt’ to enter your preferred summary.
Embedding video content to an announcement
Videos can be placed within an announcements such as YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, etc, via the iframe embed option in the editor toolbar.
Depending on the structure of the iframe snippet when it generated in your third-party tool, it may not load as intended. A workaround for this is to get the sharable URL, and wrap it in the following example format: <iframe src="<https://app.tango.us/app/embed/e9487697-1fa0-4469-a9ea-fb2600c6cbbb>" />
❗ Please be aware that the majority of email providers DO NOT support sending of videos via email and will often omit them entirely from your email content. We tackle the different options on the best way to approach videos in emails in this help article.
Search & share settings
Every announcement also has its own advanced search & share settings that can be optimized to optimize SEO performance.
Step 2. Notifications
Once you've completed the content for your announcement, it’s time to configure your notification settings. You’re able to choose whether or not you'd like to send notifications to your users about this announcement.
If you opt to notify subscribers, you'll then be able to see the following:
How many email subscribers this notification will be sent to (these are determined by the categories and roadmap items your users selected when subscribing to your page, as well as cohorts)
A customizable email subject line
How many email and Slack subscribers this notification will be sent to, the count of Slack channels (if using the integration), and the full list of targeted recipients
Step 3. Preview
Always preview an announcement before sending. The preview button is at the top right of the announcement editor, and the email notifications can be tested using the ‘Test email’ button in the Notifications card.
This is a critical step to ensuring that your recipients are seeing the content as you intend it.
Step 4. Schedule or publish
If you wish to schedule an announcement to be published at a later time, select the Schedule announcement button, and select the date and time you'd like this to automatically publish.
Once you set the date and time, you'll notice the announcement status change from draft to scheduled.
Certain roles do not have permission to edit announcements in scheduled and published states. Click to learn more about user roles.
From here, you can exit out of the announcement.
Publishing the announcement
Selecting publish now will open a confirmation modal that notes how many subscribers will be notified. Select publish now to confirm publishing and sending of notifications (if selected).
Once published, the screen will update. Published announcements have 3 tabs: Overview, Feedback, and Content.
Announcement analytics
On published announcements, the overview tab contains visitor, email, slack notification, and feedback analytics for the announcement.
Backdating, pinning, and editing published announcements
On the Content & Settings tab of a published announcement you can edit the announcement. Note that edits will not be reflected in notifications that were sent, and will only appear on live surfaces (web and embed).
The most common edit to make to change the publish date. In addition to changing the date displayed on the announcement, this will change the order it appears in the announcements page timeline.
Pinning announcements can also be done from this page, which will have the announcement display at the top of the announcements list until the specified date, after which the announcement will return to its normal position in the timeline.