Campaigns & calendar
Recurring sends you can name, pause, and measure — plus a calendar of everything queued and a subscribable feed for your own calendar app.
Open CampaignsA campaign is a send with a name and a schedule that keeps running: the Monday digest, the monthly alumni update, a drip of three messages for a recruitment push. Where Compose is for "send this thing", a campaign is for "keep sending this kind of thing".
The practical difference is measurement. A campaign's sends are attributed to it, so Analytics can tell you whether the campaign is working rather than whether one message happened to land.
Creating a campaign#
Give it a name, a type, an audience, the message, and a schedule. Types are labels for your own sanity — one-off, recurring, drip, event, party, trips, custom — and they don't change behaviour.
Names are unique per number, case-insensitively, so you can't end up with two "Weekly digest" campaigns and no idea which one is live.
Running a campaign#
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Fire now | Sends immediately, outside the schedule. On a shared number a non-admin's fire becomes an approval request instead. |
| Pause | The scheduler skips it. Nothing is deleted, and resuming picks up the schedule as it stands. |
| Resume | Back on schedule. |
| Archive | Stops the campaign and removes its pending schedule rows so nothing fires afterwards. |
| Restore | Brings an archived campaign back into the list — still stopped. It does not start sending again until you resume it. |
Pause is the one to reach for when you're unsure. Archive when a campaign is genuinely finished.
Restoring is deliberately not the same as resuming. An archived campaign is stopped, and it comes back stopped, so pulling something out of the archive to look at it can never quietly set a recurring send running again. When you do want it live, hit Resume.
Firing manually keeps the full 20-hour cooldown — a manual fire cannot re-send into a group the schedule just messaged. That's a guard against the most common self-inflicted wound: firing "just to check" an hour after the automatic send.
The same 20-hour window applies to the campaign's own scheduled sends, at any repeat interval. Full breakdown: how long the cooldown actually is.
The gates still apply#
A campaign send is a send. Every targeted group goes through the same four gates — inactive, caps, cooldown, quiet hours. A group over its daily cap is skipped for that occurrence and picked up on the next one.
This matters for scheduling: a weekly campaign and a busy event timeline aimed at the same audience will compete for the same daily cap. If your digest keeps getting skipped, the fix is usually to move it a day, not to raise the cap.
Recurring sends vs campaigns#
The Repeat option in Compose creates a bare recurring send. It works, and it shows up in the campaign list as read-only, but it has no name, no pause button, and no attribution in analytics.
Use a campaign for anything you'll want to touch again. Repeat is fine for something genuinely disposable.
Calendar#
The calendar shows everything queued — scheduled sends, campaign occurrences, and event timeline slots — on one grid, in your organisation's timezone.
It's the page that answers "what is about to go out, and are we about to hit the same people three times this week?" Worth a look every Monday.
Subscribing from your own calendar app#
You can get a private feed URL and subscribe to it from Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook, so the board sees upcoming sends without logging in.
The URL contains a secret token — treat it like a password. Anyone with the link can read your schedule. If it leaks, rotate it; the old URL stops working immediately.