Initiatives: pushing decisions to the network

What Initiatives is

Initiatives is Broadcast's outbound decision channel: the tab where you author a playbook, directive, recommendation, or experiment for the network, decide when it goes live, and, once it is live, push it to the specific franchisees you want to act on it. It is the one Broadcast tab that carries a real lifecycle (draft, active, paused, completed, archived) rather than firing once and being done, and the one where you can target individuals instead of the whole network.

Underneath, this whole tab runs on a single table, the network data, discriminated by an enum column literally named decisions, which is why the URL query string reads /broadcast?tab=decisions even though the tab pill and every label you see reads "Initiatives." You never see the raw column name in the product.

Where to find it

Open Broadcast from the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/broadcast, then click the Initiatives pill in the tab strip at the top (Announcements, Initiatives, Surveys, Polls, Consent). Initiatives lives at /broadcast?tab=decisions. Announcements is the default landing tab, so a direct link to Initiatives always needs that query string.

Every viewer, admin or not, can open the tab and see every initiative in full. Authoring, activating, and pushing are gated to group admins: if your role is not admin, the + New initiative button in the header simply is not there, and the detail view for any initiative you open reads "Status transitions and franchisee push are admin-only. Read-only view."

How Initiatives differs from an Announcement

Announcements and Initiatives sit side by side in the same tab strip and can look similar at a glance (both are things HQ sends outward), but they solve different problems:

• An Announcement is a one-way text broadcast: a subject and a short body that lands in every active franchisee's IQ feed once, with nothing to activate and no lifecycle. The only thing that comes back is a read count. There is no way to send an announcement to a subset of the network, and there is no ongoing state, once it's sent, it's sent.
• An Initiative is a structured decision with a kind (playbook, directive, recommendation, or experiment), a status that moves through draft, active, paused, completed, and archived, and a targeting step: once it's active, you choose which franchisees actually receive it and track each one's progress individually (pushed, acknowledged, in progress, completed, or declined). Initiatives can also carry an IU sponsorship budget the franchisor covers on the receiving franchisee's behalf, something an announcement has no equivalent of.

Put plainly: reach for an Announcement when you just need everyone to know something. Reach for an Initiative when you need the network (or a chosen slice of it) to actually do something, and you want to see who has and hasn't.

The hero

At the top of the Initiatives tab, the hero panel reads:

• Headline: the count of initiatives currently active (status active), the number a franchisee would experience as "currently live."
• Pill: "N live" when at least one initiative is active. If nothing is active but at least one sits in draft, it falls back to "N in draft." With nothing authored at all, it reads "No decisions yet."
• Subtext: once anything exists, a single line combining how many distinct plan kinds are actually in use ("2 kinds in use") with when the most recent initiative was authored ("last authored 3 days ago"). Singular/plural is handled automatically ("1 kind in use", not "1 kinds"). With nothing authored, admins see "No decisions yet. Click + New decision to author a playbook, directive, or recommendation for the network." Non-admins see the read-only version: "Decisions appear here as the franchisor authors playbooks, directives, and recommendations for the network."

Three secondary figures sit below the headline:

• Drafts: count of initiatives sitting in draft status, not yet activated. Sub-label reads "Pending activation," or "Nothing in draft" at zero.
• Completed 90d: initiatives whose status is completed and whose completion date falls inside the trailing 90-day window. Sub-label always reads "Rolling window," meaning this figure ages out on its own as completions fall outside 90 days, it is not a lifetime total.
• Plan kinds: how many of the four possible kinds (playbook, directive, recommendation, experiment) appear anywhere in your authored set, regardless of status. Sub-label reads "In use across the network," or "No data yet" at zero.

The four rows

Below the hero, four horizontal tile rows, each scanning newest-first (or by the logic noted per row):

Active

Initiatives with status active, up to 12, most recently activated first. Each tile shows the plan kind as its label badge (Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment), the initiative's title as its headline, the first 60 characters of the body as its sub-line (or "No description" if none was written), and a meta line reading "Activated N days ago" (or "Today" / "1 day ago" for the recent edge cases) if it has an activation timestamp, or "Activation pending" if somehow it doesn't. Click any tile to open its detail view.

Empty state: "No active decisions. Activate a draft from its detail view to deploy it across the network."

In Draft

Initiatives with status draft, up to 8. Same tile shape as Active, but the meta line reads "Created N days ago" instead of an activation date, since a draft has no activation timestamp yet.

Empty state: "No drafts in flight. Start a new decision to author a playbook or directive for the network."

Recently Completed

Initiatives with status completed whose completion date falls within the last 90 days, up to 8, sorted with the most recently completed first. Meta line reads "Completed N days ago."

Empty state: "No decisions have closed inside the last 90 days. Completed playbooks surface here as proof of network-level action."

Recent Activity

The cross-cut row: up to 12 initiatives spanning every status (active, draft, completed, paused, archived), sorted by when each was last updated rather than filtered to one status. This is the row to check when you want to see what's moving across the whole deck without filtering by state. The sub-line here reads plainly "Status: active" (or draft, completed, and so on, matching the raw status), and the meta line reads "Updated N days ago."

Empty state: "Decisions surface here as you author them."

Creating an initiative

Click + New initiative in the header (admin-only). A modal opens with:

1. 1Plan kind: a dropdown with four options, each carrying its own hint text so you know what you're picking before you commit:
2. 2- Playbook: "Canonical multi-step playbook for the network."
3. 3- Directive: "One-shot franchisor directive, do this, by this date."
4. 4- Recommendation: "Soft nudge, no enforcement, surface as guidance."
5. 5- Experiment: "A/B at the network level."
6. 6Title: required. A placeholder example reads "e.g. Quarterly cycle-time review with bottom-quartile franchisees."
7. 7Detail: optional free-text body describing the actual playbook, directive, or recommendation content.
8. 8Optionally, click Browse templates first to expand a Verinode-curated template picker inline above the form. Selecting a template pre-fills the plan kind, title, and body for you to edit before saving, and tags the initiative as "From template: [name]" with a clear link if you'd rather detach it and author from scratch.
9. 9Save. New initiatives always land in draft, they do not go live on creation. The form reminds you: "New decisions land in draft. Move them to Active from the detail view when they're ready to deploy."

The detail view: status, decoration, and franchisee push

Click any initiative tile, in any row, to open its detail view. This is where the lifecycle, the live network read, and the push-to-franchisees flow all live.

Kind and status pills. The top of the detail view shows the plan kind and current status as two small pills.

Body. The full detail text you authored, or "No description authored." if you left it blank.

Live decoration. When a background aggregator has run against this initiative, a flat "Live decoration" section appears (with a "refreshed [date]" note beside the heading) showing whichever of these facts are available:

• "Currently affects N of M franchisees" plus a signal severity read (info, warning, or critical) when the initiative is tied to a specific network signal.
• "Median time to acknowledgment: N days", how long franchisees typically take to open and acknowledge it after being pushed.
• "Median time to start: N days", how long they typically take to move from acknowledged to actually working it.
• "Completion rate: N%", the share of franchisees pushed the plan who have completed it.

This section only appears once decoration data exists, it is not present the moment an initiative is created; it fills in as the cron-driven aggregator catches up.

Status transitions. Every initiative moves through a fixed set of allowed next steps, shown as buttons in the footer (admin-only):

• Draft can move to Active or Archived.
• Active can move to Paused or Completed.
• Paused can move to Active or Archived.
• Completed can move to Archived.
• Archived is terminal, no further transitions.

Only the transitions valid from the current status render as buttons, so you never see an option that doesn't apply. Clicking one saves immediately and closes the modal.

Push to franchisees. Once an initiative is anything other than archived and at least one eligible franchisee exists, a Push to franchisees button appears in the footer. Clicking it opens a picker:

1. 1The picker lists every franchisee in your network. Anyone who has already received this specific plan shows up disabled (checkbox greyed out) with their current adoption status labeled beside their name, so you can see at a glance who already has it without accidentally re-pushing. If everyone eligible already has it, the picker reads "Every franchisee in your network has already received this plan."
2. 2Check the franchisees you want to push to, or use Select all N eligible to grab everyone who doesn't already have it.
3. 3Optionally set a Sponsorship budget per franchisee (IU, optional) figure. This is the number of Intelligence Units the franchisor will cover on each selected franchisee's behalf before that franchisee's own balance is touched. Leave it blank for no sponsorship. If you set a budget, the picker shows a live readout of the total commitment against your sponsorship pool balance ("Commits N IU vs. M IU in the pool"), warning you if the commitment would exceed what's currently funded (the cap is a ceiling, not a pre-payment: the push still succeeds, but a franchisee's sponsored draw simply pauses once the pool runs dry, so you'd fund more via Settings → Sponsorship before anyone hits the cap).
4. 4Click Push. Each selected franchisee gets an in-app notification and a detail page in their own IQ deck where they can acknowledge, work, or decline it.

Adoption summary. Back on the detail view, once at least one franchisee has been pushed this plan, an "Adoption, pushed to N franchisees" section shows a five-way count: Pushed, Acknowledged, In progress, Completed, Declined. This is the aggregate lifecycle read for this one initiative; the network-wide scoreboard across every initiative you've ever shipped lives on the separate Playbooks page (linked below).

Slow movers. When any franchisee has sat in Pushed or Acknowledged status for more than about a week without moving forward, a "Slow movers" section lists up to 5 of them (oldest first), each with their status and days-since-pushed. Where a contact email is on file, a Compose nudge button opens a pre-filled, editable check-in email; where none is on file, the row reads "Add an email in Locations" instead.

Sponsorship rollup. If any franchisee on this initiative carries a sponsorship budget, a "Sponsorship, N franchisees covered" section shows three totals: Budget IU committed, Used IU drawn down so far, and Remaining.

Timestamps. Three dates sit near the bottom of the detail view: Created, Activated, Completed, each showing a formatted date or an em dash when that milestone hasn't happened yet.

The privacy boundary

Initiatives holds the same boundary as the rest of Broadcast. HQ authors and pushes; it never gets a door into a franchisee's actual business data through this tab. What comes back is status (pushed, acknowledged, in progress, completed, declined) and network-level aggregates (affected count, median days, completion rate), never the franchisee's underlying job, invoice, or client detail. A franchisee choosing to work an initiative doesn't hand HQ their books, it just moves their own status forward on that one plan.

Best-practice example

Say Network Health is flagging that cycle time has drifted up across a cluster of franchisees. You author a Recommendation ("Tighten scheduling on multi-crew jobs, here's the playbook") rather than a Directive, since you want to nudge, not mandate, given you don't yet know the root cause everywhere. You save it as a draft, review the wording, then move it to Active from the detail view. From there, click Push to franchisees, select just the cluster of franchisees Network Health flagged (not the whole roster), and set a small sponsorship budget so the extra IU spend of working through the recommendation doesn't come out of their own balance. A week later, the adoption summary shows most have acknowledged but two are still sitting in Pushed, they show up under Slow movers, so you send a nudge. Once the cluster's cycle time recovers and every pushed franchisee has completed it, you move the initiative to Completed, and it lands in Recently Completed as a record of the play that worked.

Related help articles

• /help/broadcasting-to-your-network: the full Broadcast page, all five tabs and the shared privacy boundary
• /help/hq-overview: what HQ is and how its sections fit together
• /help/network-health: the aggregate network health view initiatives are usually authored in response to
• /help/hq-programs: the Playbooks scoreboard, adoption and outcomes ranked across every initiative you've shipped
• /help/hq-benchmarks: peer-benchmark surfaces that share the same privacy boundary
• /help/hq-standards: compliance tracking across the network
• /help/hq-compliance: the compliance-specific aggregate view
• /help/hq-report-library: where sent broadcasts and reports are archived for reference
• /help/discovery-day: onboarding new members into the network
• /help/item-19: franchise disclosure and financial-performance reporting

Data sources