Pushing an initiative to franchisees and tracking adoption

What this is

Broadcast is where HQ authors playbooks, directives, recommendations, and experiments and dispatches them to the network, then watches how the network responds. This article covers the second half of that loop: pushing an initiative to specific franchisees and tracking adoption, the per-operator lifecycle Verinode reports back as each location works through it.

The umbrella term you will see in the product is Initiative. Underneath it, every initiative is one of four plan kinds:

• Playbook: a canonical multi-step process for the network to run.
• Directive: a one-shot instruction, do this, by this date.
• Recommendation: a soft nudge with no enforcement, surfaced as guidance.
• Experiment: an A/B test run at the network level.

Verinode does not push initiatives on its own and does not decide which franchisees receive one. HQ authors the initiative, HQ decides who gets it, and Verinode reports what happens next.

Where to find it

Open Broadcast from the HQ sidebar, at hq.verinode.ai/broadcast. Broadcast is a multi-tab surface; the tab strip across the top reads Announcements · Initiatives · Surveys · Polls · Consent. Initiatives is the tab this article covers (its underlying route is /broadcast?tab=decisions, the "decisions" name is an internal table name that survives as a URL parameter, the tab label itself always reads "Initiatives").

The Initiatives page

Hero panel

At the top, a headline count of initiatives currently live across the network (status active). Beneath it:

• If nothing is live yet but drafts exist, the pill reads the number in draft instead (e.g. "3 in draft").
• If there is nothing at all, the pill reads "No decisions yet."

Three secondary figures sit beside the hero number:

• Drafts: initiatives authored but not yet activated. Sub-line reads "Pending activation," or "Nothing in draft" when zero.
• Completed 90d: initiatives marked complete inside a rolling 90-day window. Sub-line reads "Rolling window."
• Plan kinds: how many of the four kinds (playbook, directive, recommendation, experiment) are currently in use. Sub-line reads "In use across the network," or "No data yet" when zero.

When the network has at least one live or draft initiative, the subtext line under the hero reads the plan-kind count plus when the most recent one was authored, for example "2 kinds in use · last authored 3 days ago."

Empty state (no admin activity yet). If you are an admin and nothing has been authored, the subtext reads: "No decisions yet. Click + New decision to author a playbook, directive, or recommendation for the network." Non-admin viewers see: "Decisions appear here as the franchisor authors playbooks, directives, and recommendations for the network."

The four rows

• Active: initiatives currently live (status = active), most recent first, capped at 12 tiles. Each tile shows the plan kind as a label (Playbook / Directive / Recommendation / Experiment), the title as the headline, the first 60 characters of the body as a sub-line ("No description" if none was written), and when it was activated ("Activated 3 days ago" or "Activation pending" if it has not gone live). Empty state: "No active decisions. Activate a draft from its detail view to deploy it across the network."
• In Draft: initiatives an admin has authored but not yet activated, most recent first, capped at 8. Empty state: "No drafts in flight. Start a new decision to author a playbook or directive for the network."
• Recently Completed: initiatives marked complete within the last 90 days, most recently completed first, capped at 8. Empty state: "No decisions have closed inside the last 90 days. Completed playbooks surface here as proof of network-level action."
• Recent Activity: the 12 most recently updated initiatives across every status, a cross-cut view of what is moving on the deck right now. Each tile's sub-line reads the raw status (Active, Draft, Paused, Completed, Archived). Empty state: "Decisions surface here as you author them."

Click any tile to open its detail view.

Authoring an initiative

Admins see a + New initiative button in the page header. It opens a form with:

• Plan kind: choose Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment. Each option carries a one-line hint in the picker (for example, Directive reads "One-shot franchisor directive, do this, by this date").
• Title (required).
• Body, free text.
• An optional Browse templates toggle to start from a Verinode-curated template instead of a blank form. Cloning a template links the new initiative back to it for adoption tracking on the template itself.

A new initiative always starts in Draft. It is not visible to franchisees and cannot be pushed until you activate it.

Selecting franchisees and pushing

Open an initiative's tile to reach its detail view, then click Push to franchisees in the footer. That button only appears when you are an admin, the initiative is not archived, and at least one franchisee is eligible to receive it.

The push modal shows every franchisee in your network directory as a checklist:

• Franchisees who have not yet received this specific initiative are checkable. Nothing is pre-selected, you opt each one in (or use Select all N eligible at the top to check every remaining franchisee at once). The counter beside it updates live as you check boxes ("3 selected").
• Franchisees who already received this initiative appear in the same list, dimmed, with their current status printed beside their name (Pushed, Acknowledged, In progress, Completed, or Declined). You cannot select them, re-pushing to someone already in the lifecycle would reset or disrupt where they actually are, so the system will not do it; the modal surfaces this rather than hiding it, so you can see who already has it without a second query.

If literally every franchisee already has the initiative, the modal reads: "Every franchisee in your network has already received this plan." If your network directory has no franchisees in it yet, the list reads: "No franchisees are listed in your network directory yet."

Otherwise the modal reads: "Pick the franchisees you want to push this plan to. Each will get an in-app notification and a detail page they can acknowledge, work on, or decline." If some franchisees already have it and some do not, a second sentence is appended naming how many already received it ("2 franchisees have already received it and are listed below for reference").

The Push to N franchisees button at the bottom is disabled until you have at least one franchisee checked, and shows "Pushing…" while the request is in flight.

What happens on push: every newly selected franchisee gets a new adoption record starting at status Pushed, plus an in-app notification and a detail page on their side where they can move it forward or decline it. Franchisees you already pushed to are silently skipped, their existing lifecycle state is left untouched.

1. 1Open Broadcast → Initiatives and click into the initiative you want to push.
2. 2Click Push to franchisees.
3. 3Check the franchisees you want to reach, or Select all N eligible.
4. 4Optionally set a sponsorship budget (see below).
5. 5Click Push to N franchisees.
6. 6Track progress from the same detail view as statuses change.

The adoption lifecycle

Once pushed, each franchisee's relationship to the initiative moves through its own independent lifecycle. HQ never sets these past the initial push, the franchisee moves their own status forward from their side:

• Pushed: the initiative reached the franchisee. Nothing else has happened yet.
• Acknowledged: the franchisee opened it and confirmed they have seen it.
• In progress: the franchisee has started working it. Acknowledging is implied here if they skipped that step explicitly.
• Completed: the franchisee marked it done.
• Declined: the franchisee opted out. This can happen from any point in the lifecycle, not just from Pushed.

A franchisee's adoption row belongs to them. Once you have pushed an initiative to someone, you cannot force their status forward, and re-pushing the same initiative to them again does not reset it. This is deliberate: it stops an admin from accidentally wiping out a franchisee's progress by pushing a second time.

The adoption summary

Back in the initiative's detail view, once at least one franchisee has been pushed, an Adoption section appears, labeled "Adoption, pushed to N franchisees." It shows five counts side by side, one per lifecycle status: Pushed, Acknowledged, In progress, Completed, Declined. Each number is just how many of the franchisees you pushed to currently sit at that status, read left to right as the funnel the initiative is moving through.

Live decoration: completion rate and median days

Separately, a Live decoration block (when data exists) surfaces network-wide aggregate stats a background job calculates for the initiative:

• Currently affects X of Y franchisees, with a signal-severity note when the initiative is tied to a detected pattern.
• Median time to acknowledgment: the median number of days between push and acknowledgment across all franchisees who have acknowledged.
• Median time to start: the median days between push and moving to in-progress.
• Completion rate: the percentage of pushed franchisees who have reached Completed.

These figures are decorated onto the initiative by a scheduled aggregation job, not computed live on page load, so a "refreshed" timestamp is shown next to the section header. Don't expect the numbers to move the instant a franchisee changes their status; they update on the job's own cadence.

Slow movers

When at least one franchisee has sat at Pushed or Acknowledged for more than 7 days without moving forward, a Slow movers section lists up to 5 of them, oldest first, each showing the franchisee name, current status, and days since pushed. A Compose nudge button opens a pre-filled email (a mailto link) addressed to that franchisee's contact, with a colleague-toned check-in message already drafted (you can edit it before sending). If a franchisee has no contact email on file, the row reads "Add an email in Locations" instead of the nudge button.

Sponsorship: covering the AI cost of adoption

When you push an initiative, you can optionally set a sponsorship budget per franchisee, denominated in IU (Intelligence Units, the platform's usage currency). This field appears in the push modal, labeled "Sponsorship budget per franchisee (IU, optional)," defaulting to blank (no sponsorship).

If you set a number greater than zero, every franchisee newly pushed in that batch gets that many IUs earmarked: when they do AI work tied to this initiative, the franchisor's group pool covers the cost first, up to that per-operator cap, before the franchisee's own IU balance is touched at all.

As you type a budget with franchisees selected, the modal shows a live commitment line: "Commits X IU vs. Y IU in the pool." If the total you are about to commit (budget × number selected) exceeds what is currently in your pool, the line turns to a warning: it names the shortfall and tells you the push will still go through (the cap is a ceiling, not a pre-payment) but drawdowns will pause once the pool runs dry, and directs you to fund the pool from Settings → Sponsorship. If the pool covers the commitment, the line confirms it in the affirmative.

Re-pushing an already-pushed franchisee never changes a sponsorship budget you set earlier; only new pushes carry a new budget.

Once at least one franchisee in the initiative carries a sponsorship budget, the detail view shows a Sponsorship section with three figures: Budget IU (total earmarked across all sponsored franchisees on this initiative), Used IU (how much of that has actually been drawn on), and Remaining (the difference). This is a rollup for this one initiative, not your network-wide sponsorship pool balance, which lives under Settings.

The privacy boundary

HQ sees adoption status. HQ never sees a franchisee's underlying job data, financials, or operational detail, on this page or anywhere adoption is tracked.

Concretely:

• The five lifecycle states (Pushed / Acknowledged / In progress / Completed / Declined) and their timestamps are all HQ can read about how a franchisee is engaging with an initiative.
• A franchisee can attach private notes to their own progress on their side. Those notes are not part of what HQ's queries pull back, they stay with the franchisee.
• HQ cannot move a franchisee's status forward, back, or to Declined on their behalf. The only lifecycle-mutating action HQ has is the initial push (which creates the row at Pushed); every transition after that belongs to the franchisee.
• The completion-rate and median-days figures are network aggregates. They describe the pace of the network as a whole, they are not a substitute for seeing what any one franchisee is actually doing in their own business.

This is the same boundary that runs through every HQ surface: franchisees own their operational data, HQ works with aggregates, statuses, and compliance signals built on top of it. See Network Health for how that boundary is drawn across the rest of the platform.

Related articles

• Broadcasting to your network
• HQ overview
• Network health
• HQ programs
• HQ compliance
• HQ benchmarks