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Initiative lifecycle and status transitions

Every initiative you author in Broadcast, a playbook, directive, recommendation, or experiment, moves through a five-status lifecycle: **Draft**, **Active**, **Paused**, **Completed**, **Archived**…

9 min read·Updated July 14, 2026
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What this is

Every initiative you author in Broadcast, a playbook, directive, recommendation, or experiment, moves through a five-status lifecycle: Draft, Active, Paused, Completed, Archived. The status you set decides three things at once: which row on the Broadcast page the initiative sits in, whether it can be pushed to franchisees, and whether the network gets notified. This article documents the full status matrix, what each status means operationally, and the admin-only controls that move an initiative between them.

Verinode does not decide when an initiative is done or ready to go live. It surfaces the plan, tracks who has engaged with it, and gives you the transition buttons. You make the call.

Where to find it

Open Broadcast from the HQ sidebar, or go to hq.verinode.ai/broadcast?tab=decisions. The Initiatives tab sits in the tab strip alongside Announcements, Surveys, Polls, and Consent (the tab id in the URL is decisions, the underlying database table name, but the operator-facing label everywhere on screen is Initiatives).

Click any initiative tile, in the Active row, In Draft row, Recently Completed row, or Recent Activity row, to open its detail modal. The status matrix and the transition buttons live inside that modal, in the footer, and are visible only to HQ admins.

Note

This article covers status only. For how an initiative gets pushed to franchisees, tracked for acknowledgment, and optionally sponsored with IUs, see Broadcasting to your network.

The five statuses

| Status | Pill label | What it means | Where it shows | |---|---|---|---| | draft | Draft | Authored but not yet live. Not visible to franchisees, cannot be pushed. | In Draft row | | active | Active | Live on the network. Can be pushed to franchisees; adoption tracking begins. | Active row | | paused | Paused | Temporarily on hold. Still not archived, can be reactivated. | No dedicated row; surfaces only in Recent Activity | | completed | Completed | Finished its run. | Recently Completed row (only within the last 90 days) | | archived | Archived | Retired. Terminal, no further transitions. | No dedicated row; surfaces only in Recent Activity |

Every initiative starts life as Draft the moment an HQ admin clicks + New initiative and saves it. There is no way to create an initiative that starts Active. It has to move there deliberately.

A quiet but real consequence of this table: Paused and Archived initiatives have no dedicated row of their own on the Broadcast page. The only place either one still surfaces is the Recent Activity row, which lists the 12 most recently updated initiatives across every status, and only for as long as they stay inside that top-12 window. Pause or archive something and let 12 newer initiatives get touched after it, and it drops out of view entirely, though it still exists and its status can still be read from its detail modal if you know to open it. There is currently no "all paused" or "all archived" list.

Likewise, Completed has a hidden expiry: the Recently Completed row only shows initiatives completed within the last 90 days. An initiative you completed 91 days ago quietly falls out of that row. It does not move anywhere else, it is simply no longer surfaced on the page (it may still appear in Recent Activity if it was recently updated for some other reason).

The status matrix

The transitions below are the only ones the platform allows. There is no status you can jump to from anywhere; each status has a fixed, narrow set of next steps, enforced both in what buttons render and, independently, on the server:

  1. 1Draft → Active. Sets activated_at to the moment you click it. This is the "go live" transition: the initiative becomes pushable to franchisees and starts being decorated with live adoption stats.
  2. 2Draft → Archived. Retires a draft that never went anywhere, no activation, no notification, no adoption trail.
  3. 3Active → Paused. Takes a live initiative off the "currently pushable" surface without losing its history or adoption data. Silent, no notification fires.
  4. 4Active → Completed. Sets completed_at to the moment you click it. This is the "finished its run" transition and the one that fires a completion notification to the rest of your HQ team.
  5. 5Paused → Active. Reactivates a paused initiative. Does not reset activated_at, that timestamp still reflects when it first went live, not when it was resumed.
  6. 6Paused → Archived. Retires an initiative that was on hold rather than reactivating it.
  7. 7Completed → Archived. The only path out of Completed. There is no "reopen a completed initiative" transition.
  8. 8Archived is terminal. No status leads out of Archived. Once an initiative is archived, its detail modal shows no transition buttons at all, and it cannot be pushed to franchisees regardless of who is viewing it.

Notice what is missing: there is no direct Draft → Completed, Draft → Paused, or Active → Draft transition. An initiative has to pass through Active before it can be marked Completed, and once it leaves Draft it can never go back to Draft.

Tip

If you authored an initiative by mistake and want it gone from the working rows without deleting anything, Archive is the move from any non-terminal status. There is no delete action for initiatives; Archived is the platform's version of "done with this."

The admin-only status controls

Inside the detail modal, the footer renders a Mark [Status] button for every status reachable from the initiative's current status, one button per allowed transition. Draft shows two buttons (Mark Active, Mark Archived). Active shows two (Mark Paused, Mark Completed). Paused shows two (Mark Active, Mark Archived). Completed shows one (Mark Archived). Archived shows none.

The buttons are visually weighted by what they do:

  • Mark Active renders as the primary (filled copper) button, the default hero action of the modal footer.
  • Mark Archived renders as a ghost (low-emphasis, text-only) button, since it is a terminal, retiring action.
  • Every other transition (Mark Paused, Mark Completed) renders as a secondary button.

Clicking a transition button disables every button in the footer, relabels itself "Saving…", and calls the status update. On success, the page refreshes and the modal closes, dropping you back on the Broadcast page with the initiative now sitting in its new row. On failure, the buttons re-enable and an error line appears above the footer (for example, "Decision not found in this group," which happens if the initiative was somehow removed from the underlying group between the modal opening and the click, a rare race rather than a normal user error).

These controls exist only for HQ admins. If you are viewing as a non-admin HQ user, the detail modal renders no status pills as buttons at all. Instead, a single line of text sits where the buttons would be: "Status transitions and franchisee push are admin-only. Read-only view." You can still see everything else in the modal, the description, the live decoration stats, the created and activated and completed timestamps, just not change anything.

Heads up

Status changes are scoped to your own network. The server re-checks that the initiative belongs to your group on every single update, even though the id you're clicking came straight from your own screen. A forged or stale id from another network's initiative updates zero rows rather than someone else's data. You will never be able to change the status of an initiative that isn't yours, and nobody outside your network can change yours.

What fires when you change status

Two transitions notify the rest of your HQ team with an in-app bell notification, linking back to Broadcast:

  • Draft → Active: "Activated [kind]: [title]" / "Now live on the network."
  • Active → Completed: "Completed [kind]: [title]" / "Marked complete."

Every other transition, Draft → Archived, Active → Paused, Paused → Active, Paused → Archived, Completed → Archived, is silent. These are treated as admin-driven housekeeping rather than events the rest of the team needs to be pinged about. The admin who made the change never gets notified about their own action either way; notifications only go to other HQ users in the group.

How status gates the push-to-franchisees button

The detail modal's Push to franchisees button only appears for HQ admins, and only when the initiative is not Archived and at least one franchisee in your network is eligible to receive it. Draft initiatives can technically be pushed (the "save and push at the same time" flow), but in practice most initiatives are pushed once they reach Active. Archived initiatives can never be pushed, the server rejects the attempt even if a button were somehow visible.

Full detail on what happens after a push, acknowledgment tracking, the slow-mover follow-up nudge, and IU sponsorship, lives in Broadcasting to your network.

Timestamps in the detail modal

Three timestamps sit on one row near the bottom of the modal, each reading an en dash when the initiative hasn't reached that point yet:

  • Created: when the initiative was first authored, always populated, set once and never changes.
  • Activated: when it last moved from Draft or Paused into Active. Reactivating from Paused does not update this date, it is stamped only on the first Draft → Active transition.
  • Completed: when it was marked Completed. An initiative that later gets archived keeps its original Completed date; Completed → Archived does not clear or overwrite it.

The four initiative kinds

The lifecycle and its status matrix apply identically regardless of which kind of initiative you're looking at. The kind is a separate, orthogonal label shown as a pill at the top of the detail modal:

  • Playbook
  • Directive
  • Recommendation
  • Experiment

Kind changes only the color accent on the tile (each kind gets its own accent) and the wording in the create button and notifications. It has no effect on which statuses are reachable or which controls appear.

Empty states

  • Active row, no active initiatives: "No active decisions. Activate a draft from its detail view to deploy it across the network."
  • In Draft row, no drafts: "No drafts in flight. Start a new decision to author a playbook or directive for the network."
  • Recently Completed row, nothing completed in the last 90 days: "No decisions have closed inside the last 90 days. Completed playbooks surface here as proof of network-level action."
  • Recent Activity row, nothing authored yet: "Decisions surface here as you author them."
  • Hero panel, no initiatives of any status exist yet: for HQ admins, "No decisions yet. Click + New decision to author a playbook, directive, or recommendation for the network." For non-admin HQ users, "Decisions appear here as the franchisor authors playbooks, directives, and recommendations for the network."

The privacy boundary

Initiatives are an HQ-authored, HQ-to-network broadcast surface. Authoring, editing, and moving an initiative through its lifecycle never touches franchisee business data, margin, cash, job files, or anything else that lives inside a franchisee's own account. What HQ sees when a franchisee engages with a pushed initiative is limited to adoption status (pushed, acknowledged, in progress, declined, completed) and, if the initiative was sponsored, aggregate IU consumption against the sponsorship cap. Franchisees own their underlying data; HQ never gets a window into it through this surface or any other.

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