Events

Most promotion isn't one message, it's five spread over two weeks. Events is the page that writes that timeline for you: describe the event once, pick how hard you want to push it, and PromotionBot generates the queued messages leading up to it. Edit what you like, drop what you don't, launch.

Creating an event#

You give the event a name, a date and time, and an audience (tags, presets, or specific groups — same targeting as Compose). Optionally a location, a link, and a type — a party gets different default copy than a deadline.

From that, PromotionBot proposes a timeline.

The timeline#

Each message in the timeline has a role, which determines both when it goes out and what the default copy sounds like:

All times are in your organisation's timezone. These are the defaults a role carries on its own — a cadence preset can override them, and the deadline preset does exactly that (its 3-day reminder goes out at midday, not in the evening).

Cadence presets#

Rather than assembling that by hand, pick a shape:

Standard is the right default. Aggressive is for your one big event of the year, not for every drinks night — five messages about the same thing is where communities start muting you. Deadline is shaped for applications and sign-up cut-offs, where the final morning is what matters.

You can also just say "give me three messages" and PromotionBot builds the ladder backwards from the day-of slot, so each extra message adds an earlier touch.

Slots that would land in the past — or within the next five minutes — are dropped automatically, so creating an event two days out with the Aggressive preset won't try to send a save-the-date for last week.

Editing slots#

Every slot is editable: rewrite the copy, move the time, change the role label to anything you like (a custom "Early bird" slot is fine), add slots, delete slots. A timeline can hold up to 30 messages, which is far more than you should ever use.

If your deployment has AI enabled, you can have message copy suggested per slot. Same rule as everywhere else: it's a draft, you're the editor.

Saved cadence presets#

If your organisation has a house style — "we always do save-the-date, two reminders, and a morning-of" — save it as your own preset. Admins can publish a preset to the whole organisation so committees inherit it instead of reinventing the cadence each time; anything you don't publish stays private to you.

Before you launch#

Launching materialises the timeline into real queued sends. Before it does, PromotionBot checks for the things that go wrong:

• Conflicts — other events or scheduled sends hitting the same audience around the same time. Two committees promoting different parties into the same year group on the same evening is the classic one.
• Health warnings — groups that will be skipped or squeezed when the slot fires: an empty audience, suppressed groups, inactive groups, groups at risk of hitting their daily cap, and two slots landing on the same day. Cooldown is not among them — it's evaluated when the slot actually fires, not at launch.

These are warnings, not blocks. You can launch anyway; you just do it knowing.

Admins can also suppress groups so no event reaches them, without changing their tags — useful for a group that asked to be left out of event promotion. Note the scope: the suppression list is org-wide and admin-only, so a suppressed group is skipped by every event launch, not just this one. There is no per-event suppression.

After launch#

• Queued slots appear in the calendar alongside everything else you have coming up.
• Each slot respects the same gates as any other send — caps, cooldown, quiet hours. A slot whose groups are all blocked is skipped, and the reason is recorded.
• Each slot is its own source. So the cooldown (20 hours, for a timeline slot) stops a single slot repeating into a group — it does not stop your announcement and your reminder from both landing there. Spacing the ladder is what does that, and the daily cap is the real ceiling on same-day volume.

You can clone an event for next term, or transfer ownership to whoever's running it this year — the timeline comes along.

Members proposing events#

On a shared number, a member can build an event and request launch rather than launching it. That lands in the approval queue for an admin to review — copy, timeline, and audience all visible before anything is queued. The request button disables itself once submitted, so nobody fires three duplicate requests while waiting.

A worked example#

Event promotion playbook walks a real two-week timeline end to end, including what to put in each message.