Starting an initiative from a Verinode template

What this is

An initiative is what Verinode HQ calls a playbook, directive, recommendation, or experiment that your organization authors and pushes out across the network. Writing one from a blank form works fine, but it means typing out the plan kind, title, and body every time, even for initiatives your organization (or others on Verinode) has already run before.

The template picker is the inline "Browse templates" flow built into the initiative editor. It lets you pick a curated starting point from Verinode's template library, grouped by category, and use it to pre-fill the plan kind, title, and body of a new initiative before you tweak it and save. It also tracks, quietly, how often each template gets used, so the library itself gets more useful over time.

This article covers only that picker flow: opening it, filtering it, using a template, forking versus keeping the link back to the source template, and how the adoption count moves. For the initiatives surface itself (statuses, adoption tracking, pushing to franchisees), see Broadcasting to your network.

Where to find it

Open Broadcast from the HQ sidebar, at hq.verinode.ai/broadcast. Broadcast is a tabbed dispatch surface with five payload types across the top: Announcements, Initiatives, Surveys, Polls, and Consent. Click the Initiatives tab (it lands on /broadcast?tab=decisions).

If your HQ account has admin access, a + New initiative button sits in the top-right corner of the page header. Click it to open the authoring modal. The template picker lives inside that modal, above the form fields.

Browsing the template library

Inside the New initiative modal, above the Plan kind, Title, and Detail fields, there's a small text link:

• Browse templates, if you haven't picked a template yet.
• Browse templates again, if you already have (see below).
• Hide templates, once the picker is open.

Click it and a bordered region expands directly above the form, no separate popup or nested modal. Inside it:

Category chips. A row of pill buttons across the top: All (N) first, showing the total count of published templates, followed by one chip per category that actually has at least one template in it, each labeled with its count, for example Operations (5). The active chip is filled solid; the rest are plain. Click a category chip to narrow the list to that category, click All to clear the filter. Only categories with published templates appear, so you never see a chip with a zero count.

The categories in use are: Operations, Safety, Reputation, Compliance, Recruiting, Finance, and General.

The template list. Below the chips, a scrolling, hairline-divided list of templates. Each row shows:

• A small label line: the template's kind (Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment) in bold caps, then the category it belongs to, then, only if the template has been used at least once, "used N×", the running adoption count for that template.
• The template's name in bold, this is what becomes your initiative's title if you use it.
• A one-line description underneath, in muted text, explaining what the template is for.
• A Use this button on the right.

Templates come back from the library already sorted with the most-adopted ones first (ties broken alphabetically by name), so under All, the templates other HQ organizations on Verinode reach for most often naturally rise toward the top, category filtering doesn't change that ordering, it just narrows the set.

Loading, error, and empty states

• While the library is fetching: "Loading templates…"
• If the fetch fails: "Couldn't load templates: [error detail]"
• If there are no published templates in the library at all: "No templates published yet. Start from scratch below."
• If a selected category somehow has nothing in it: "No templates in this category yet."

None of these are broken states, they mean exactly what they say: the library hasn't returned data yet, failed to load, or is genuinely empty for that filter. You can always close the picker and write the initiative from scratch regardless of what the library shows.

Using a template to start an initiative

1. 1Click Browse templates to expand the picker.
2. 2Optionally, click a category chip to narrow the list.
3. 3Find the template you want and click Use this on its row.

Clicking Use this does four things at once:

• The Plan kind dropdown snaps to the template's kind (Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment).
• The Title field fills with the template's name.
• The Detail box fills with the template's body text (if the template has no body, Detail stays empty).
• The picker collapses, and a marker appears next to the Browse templates link reading "From template: [name]", with a clear link beside it.

Every field the template touched is still a normal, editable form field. Nothing is locked. You can change the plan kind, rewrite the title, or replace the entire body before saving, the template is a starting point, not a contract. Editing those fields does not, by itself, detach the template link, that only happens if you click clear (see below).

If you open Browse templates again and pick a different template, the new one overwrites whatever is currently in Title, Detail, and Plan kind, and the "From template" marker updates to point at the new template. There's no way to combine two templates in one initiative, each selection replaces the last.

Fork vs. keep the source-template link

Once you've picked a template, you have two paths forward, and the difference matters for how the adoption count moves.

Keep the link. Leave the "From template: [name]" marker in place and just save. Verinode records which template the initiative came from, and when the save succeeds, that template's adoption count goes up by one. This is the default path, and it's what you want if you're using the template largely as-is, even with edits to wording.

Fork it. Click clear next to the "From template" marker. This detaches the pointer to the source template, everything currently in the Plan kind, Title, and Detail fields stays exactly as it is. The initiative saves as fully independent content with no record of which template it started from, and the source template's adoption count does not move. Use this when you've reshaped the template enough that you don't want it credited as the origin, or when you'd rather the initiative stand on its own.

There's no way to re-attach a template link once you've cleared it short of reopening Browse templates and picking a template again (which will overwrite your edited content).

What the adoption count actually means

Every published template carries an adoption count. It's a simple tally: one for every time an HQ admin, anywhere on Verinode, picked that template, kept the link, and successfully saved an initiative from it. It shows up in the picker as "used N×" next to any template that has been used at least once, and it's also the reason the library sorts the way it does, templates with a higher count surface first under All.

A few things worth understanding about it:

• It's cross-network, not just your organization. The template library is shared, every HQ organization on Verinode browses the same catalog. A count of "used 12×" reflects adoption across every organization that has used that template, not just yours.
• It's a usage count, not a performance score. Adoption count tells you a template got picked and saved, it says nothing about whether the resulting initiative worked, whether franchisees engaged with it, or how it performed. Read it as "this is a commonly reached-for starting point," not "this is a proven playbook."
• The bump happens after your initiative is created, and it's best-effort. Verinode saves your initiative first. Only after that succeeds does it try to increment the source template's counter. If that increment fails for any reason, your initiative is unaffected, saved and usable exactly as normal, you'd just occasionally see a template's count not tick up on a given save. This is a deliberate design choice: the counter is a nice-to-have signal, not something worth blocking or rolling back an initiative over.
• Verinode re-checks the template before crediting it. When you save, the server confirms the source template you picked still exists and is still published (not withdrawn or unpublished since you opened the picker). If it isn't, your initiative still saves normally, it just saves without a template credit and without a bump, silently. You won't see an error for this, it's a safety check running quietly in the background.

Plan kinds and categories, quick reference

Every template (and every initiative) carries one of four kinds, shown as a hint under the Plan kind dropdown when selected:

| Plan kind | What it means | |---|---| | Playbook | A canonical, multi-step playbook for the network to follow. | | Directive | A one-shot franchisor directive: do this, by this date. | | Recommendation | A soft nudge: no enforcement, surfaced as guidance. | | Experiment | An A/B test run at the network level. |

Categories are a separate axis, used purely for organizing the library: Operations, Safety, Reputation, Compliance, Recruiting, Finance, and General.

Saving the initiative

Whether you started from a template or from a blank form, saving works the same way. Title is required, if you leave it blank and click Create draft, the field errors with "Title is required." Detail (the body) is optional.

Under the Detail field, a fixed note explains what happens next: "New decisions land in draft. Move them to Active from the detail view when they're ready to deploy." Every new initiative, template-sourced or not, is created with status draft. Nothing goes out to franchisees the moment you click Create draft, you review it, and when it's ready, you move it to Active from the initiative's detail view.

Click Create draft to save, the button reads "Saving…" while the write is in flight. Click Cancel at any point to close the modal without saving.

Best-practice example

Say your organization runs a quarterly cycle-time review with its bottom-performing franchisees every quarter, and a Verinode-curated template for exactly that already exists in the Operations category. Instead of writing the directive from scratch each quarter: open + New initiative, click Browse templates, filter to Operations, and click Use this on the cycle-time review template. The plan kind, title, and body all fill in from last time's structure. Adjust the date and any specifics for this quarter, leave the "From template" link in place, and click Create draft. The template's adoption count ticks up, which is a small signal to Verinode (and, in aggregate, to other organizations browsing the same library) that this template is a proven, recurring pattern, not a one-off.

Privacy boundary

The template library itself is catalog content: Verinode-curated playbooks and directives, not franchisee business data. Adoption counts reflect how often HQ admins across the network reach for a given template, never which franchisees an initiative was pushed to or how any individual franchisee responded. Franchisee-level detail on adoption, acknowledgment, and completion for an initiative you've authored lives on that initiative's own detail view, covered in Broadcasting to your network, and stays scoped to your own organization's franchisees throughout. HQ never sees another organization's initiatives, franchisee rosters, or business data through this picker or anywhere else.

Related articles

• Broadcasting to your network, the full Initiatives surface: statuses, activating a draft, pushing to franchisees, and adoption tracking.
• HQ overview, how the HQ sidebar and network intelligence layer fit together.
• HQ programs, the network's structured programs, a different push mechanism from initiatives.