Announcements: short text broadcasts to every location

What Announcements is

Announcements is the default tab of the Broadcast section, HQ's one-way messaging channel to your whole network. You write a subject line and one paragraph of plain text, send it, and Verinode fans it out to every active operator: it lands as a bell notification, it appears as a feed card in each operator's IQ feed, and it is folded into that operator's daily digest or weekly briefing email if the timing lines up. There is no reply channel and no per-operator targeting. Announcements is built for network-wide updates: a policy change, a program deadline, a heads-up about an upcoming compliance push, a note of thanks after a strong quarter.

Verinode calls your network's members "franchisees," "locations," or "members" depending on how your network is set up (association, buying group, or a single-owner multi-location book), but Announcements always reaches everyone the same way regardless of the label. Nothing here overrides the privacy boundary that runs through the rest of HQ: what you send is visible to your whole network, but HQ still cannot see into an individual location's private business data. Announcements moves in one direction, HQ to network, and read counts return only as an aggregate number.

Where to find it

Open Broadcast from the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/broadcast. Announcements is the tab that loads by default, no query string needed. The other four tabs sit in a rounded pill strip just under the page title: click Initiatives, Surveys, Polls, or Consent to switch, or click back to Announcements to return here.

Every HQ user in your organization, not just admins, can open this tab and see the hero numbers and the list of recent broadcasts. Composing and sending a new one is restricted to admins, covered below.

The hero panel

At the top of the page, four numbers summarize your broadcast activity.

Headline number, sent in the last 30 days. The large number under the eyebrow "Text announcements" is how many broadcasts you have sent in the trailing 30 days. Next to it, a pill reads "N sent 30d" when you have sent at least one, or "Nothing sent recently" when you have not.

Subtext line. Below the headline, one of two lines appears depending on whether you have ever sent a broadcast:

• If you have never sent one: "Send a broadcast to push a text message into every active operator's IQ feed. Receipts post back as read counts."
• If you have sent at least one: a count of your total broadcasts authored, plus, when available, how long ago the most recent one went out (for example, "12 total broadcasts authored, last sent 3 days ago").

Three secondary metrics run alongside the headline:

• Operator reads 30d: the sum of read receipts across every broadcast sent in the last 30 days. This is a raw sum, not a unique-operator count, so if the same operator reads two different broadcasts in the window, that counts twice.
• All-time broadcasts: your total broadcast count since you started using the feature, with a subline showing when the last one went out, or "None sent yet" if you have not sent any.
• Avg reads / broadcast: total reads from the last 30 days divided by the number of broadcasts sent in that same window, rounded to the nearest whole number. If you have not sent anything in the last 30 days, this reads 0, even if older broadcasts still have reads coming in, the average is scoped to the current window on both sides of the division.

None of these four numbers require any peer or benchmark data. They are pulled directly from your own network's broadcast history, nothing here is compared against other HQ organizations.

Recent broadcasts

Below the hero, the Recent broadcasts row lists up to 12 of your most recently sent broadcasts as wide tiles, newest first. Each tile shows:

• Read count label, top of the tile: "N read" or "N reads."
• Headline: the subject line exactly as you typed it when you sent it.
• Sub-line: the first 80 characters of the body, with the rest cut and marked with an ellipsis if the message runs longer.
• Meta line: "Sent X ago" (today, N days ago, or N months ago), and, when enough data exists, a short trend note like "+3 reads vs Jun 28."

That trend note only appears once Verinode has captured at least two daily snapshots of that broadcast's read count. A nightly network-refresh job records each broadcast's live read total once a day, so a broadcast sent minutes ago will not show a trend yet, and one sent yesterday will show its first data point tomorrow. Once there are two or more snapshots, the tile compares the latest one to whichever snapshot lands closest to seven days earlier and shows the difference. A broadcast with a flat read count over that window shows no trend line at all, not a "+0."

Click any tile to open the full message.

Empty state

If you have never sent a broadcast, the Recent broadcasts row reads: "No broadcasts authored yet. Use the Send broadcast button to push a text update into every active operator's IQ feed."

Opening a broadcast

Clicking a tile opens a detail view with the full record of that send:

• A chip showing the read count ("N reads"), a relative send time ("Today," "3d ago," "2w ago," or "4mo ago"), and the exact send date and time.
• A read-trend line, when the data supports it: comparing the latest daily snapshot to the snapshot closest to 30 days earlier, shown as "+N reads vs [date] (M reads)" in green for a gain or in red for a drop. This is a longer window than the trend note on the tile itself (30 days here versus 7 days on the tile), so the two numbers will not always match, they are answering different questions: "how is this trending this week" versus "how has it moved over the last month."
• The full message body under a "Message" heading, exactly as written, with line breaks preserved.
• A footer note: "Per-franchisee receipt breakdown + resend / clone actions arrive with the broadcast lifecycle redesign. Today this view is read-only." In plain terms: you can see who was reached in aggregate but not a named list of who has and has not read it yet, and there is currently no button to resend or duplicate a past broadcast. Both are planned, not shipped.

Sending a broadcast

The Send broadcast button sits in the page header, to the right of the tab strip. It only appears for HQ admins, non-admin HQ users can read the hero and the recent-broadcasts list but cannot compose a new send.

1. 1Click Send broadcast. A modal titled "Send broadcast" opens.
2. 2Fill in Subject, a short headline (placeholder example: "Quarterly rollup ready").
3. 3Fill in Body, one short paragraph written the way you would want an operator to read it inside their own IQ feed. A helper note under the field reminds you: "Plain text only. The broadcast lands in every active operator's IQ feed; read receipts roll back up to your Broadcasts tab."
4. 4The Send to network button stays disabled until both fields have text in them.
5. 5Click Send to network. While it sends, the button shows a loading state. On success, a confirmation line appears naming how many operators it reached (for example, "Sent to 4 operators"), the modal then closes on its own and the page refreshes to show the new broadcast at the top of Recent broadcasts.

What happens when you send

• The message is written to your network's broadcast record and encrypted at rest under your network's own key.
• Every operator who has completed onboarding and is currently linked to your network receives an in-app bell notification, and the same message appears as an article-style card in their IQ feed for 14 days from the send. After that window it drops out of the feed but stays reachable from the bell.
• If the send happens within the last 24 hours of an operator's daily digest email, it leads that digest. If it happens within the trailing 7 days of their weekly briefing email, it is included there too. Unlike other digest content, operators cannot turn broadcasts off from their notification preferences, network-level messages reach the whole network, not just the operators who have digest categories enabled.
• Any other HQ admin in your organization gets an internal notification confirming the broadcast went out and how many operators it reached, so a second admin does not need to check the Broadcast page to know a message was sent.
• When an operator opens the broadcast from their feed card or bell notification, Verinode records that as a read and adds one to the aggregate read count you see here. HQ never sees which named operator generated that read, only the running total.

Best-practice example

Say you want to confirm a compliance deadline moved. Open Broadcast, confirm you are on Announcements (the default tab), and check the hero: if "Sent 30d" is already high, consider whether this really needs a network-wide push or whether it belongs on a specific location's Initiative instead, since Announcements has no reply channel and no read-by-name list, it is best used for updates every location genuinely needs to see, not for anything you need an individual answer to. Write a subject that states the change plainly ("Compliance deadline moved to August 15"), keep the body to the one paragraph the field is built for, and send. Check back in a day or two: the Recent broadcasts tile will show a read count and, once two snapshots exist, a short trend line, that is your signal for whether the update actually landed.

Related reading

• HQ overview for how Broadcast fits alongside the rest of the HQ shell.
• Broadcasting to your network for how Announcements relates to Initiatives, Surveys, Polls, and Consent, the other four ways to reach your network from this page.
• Network health for the aggregate view of how your locations are performing, separate from anything you send them.
• HQ compliance for tracking whether a compliance-driven announcement actually resulted in action.

Data sources