Enhancement

Announcements (fka Knowledge Alerts) enhancements: Improving visibility and send-ability

Related products: Knowledge Management Tools

We know how important it is to be able to cut through the daily noise to share important updates internally, which is why we’re excited to announce several significant enhancements to Guru’s announcements (fka “Knowledge Alerts”) functionality. Announcements allow you to proactively send a Guru Card to a specified audience and ask that audience to confirm that they’ve read it. This functionality is relied on by many customers like you to enable critical internal communications in this hybrid work world, so we’ve prioritized making that workflow even more robust. Read on to learn how we’ve increased both the flexibility of sending announcements and your visibility into sent announcements. NOTE: for the most up-to-date overview of announcements capabilities, please see this Help Center article


Making it easier to send announcements:

  1. Send announcements to individual users. Previously, users could only send an announcement to a group in Guru, not an individual user. As highlighted in this Community feedback post, this limitation often led to the creation of new groups just to be able to send an announcement to the right people. To remove that friction, you can now send an announcement to groups and/or individuals as you see fit!

  2. Send an announcement to any group if the All Members group is permissioned on the Collection. To send an announcement to a group, you previously had to make sure that that group was added to the Collection that housed the Card, even if that Collection was already shared with All Members. This led to duplicate groups being permissioned on Collections solely to be able to receive announcements. To simplify permissioning, you can now select any group to receive an announcement when the All Members group has been added to a Collection, without having to add each additional group to the Collection as well.

  3. Send an announcement from a restricted Card. Restricted Cards are only visible to individuals who have been invited to view the Card by the Card’s author. Now that Guru supports sending announcements to individuals, authors can also send announcements from restricted Cards to individuals who have access to the restricted Card. 

    Note: Restricted Cards cannot be shared with groups, so announcements on restricted Cards may not be sent to groups.

Improving visibility into announcements:

  1. Allow users to revisit announcements they’ve already read. After a user confirms that they’ve read an announcement, there has been no way to re-review that alert. Announcement senders often include context as to why they're requesting users read a Card, and that context is lost once the announcement is dismissed. Moving forward, we have added the ability to view all previously-read announcements so users can reference important info that has been shared with them, even after they've confirmed they read it. Toggle between ‘read’ and ‘unread’ announcements to maintain a running list of important updates you’ve received in Guru.

  2. Show Authors all sent announcements in Collections they have Author access to. Another popular announcement feedback item from the Community tells us that Authors and Collection Owners desire visibility into all the announcements sent by their teams from a given Collection to understand what comms are going out to the broader organization. Now, Authors and Collection Owners can see all sent announcements for Collections that they have Author or Collection Owner access to.

    Note: This functionality does not give Admins the ability to see all announcements sent across every Collection; only across Collections in which they have Author access.
     
  3. Update styling of announcements. To better improve visibility into announcements, we’ve made subtle updates to the styling of the interface and overall announcements experience.

We hope you enjoy these updates that make announcements easier to send and increase visibility into sent announcements. Thanks to those of you who have submitted and voted on announcements feedback items in this Community! We appreciate you sharing with us how we can make Guru better for you and your teams. We can’t wait to hear how you use this new functionality to share knowledge and improve internal comms across your organization!

Nice updates!


Thanks @Steve Stark !


This is awesome! Excited for both being able to tag individual users (goodbye, onboarding group) and having insight into all sent! Very cool to see I’m not the only one sending out announcements. FYI @Ian Link :tada:


Fantastic @Amanda Labby - I’m excited to hear that this functionality will be helpful to your team! Let us know if you have any additional feedback as you try it out! 


Very comprehensive overhaul. Nice work!


 


This is great! :grin:


Yay! Thanks @Kristin Fretz @Ian Link @Akane Sudre! I’m excited to share your feedback with the pod that worked on this! 


Amazing! Especially love being able to see all announcements sent. Hoping in the future we’ll be able to pull data (i.e. % Read) for all announcements sent in a designated period of time


^ second the above! Love these developments and hope to see the ability to pull individual agent read rates soon so we can hold agents accountable!


Hey there! Congrats for including this amazing feature.

Do you know if this feature is also implemented in the API side (endpoint --> /api/v1/alerts). For now, I can only see the announcements that have been sent by my team, but not those sent by other authors :thinking:


Hey @Akane Sudre! Great question! Yes - When issuing a call to the GET /api/v1/alerts you'll only receive a list of announcements you've sent. However, you can add a view parameter to your query which would return a list of all sent announcements for Collections that you have Author access on.  So, for example, you can try to use this: /api/v1/alerts?view=ALL_SENT. Note you will need to page your results following these instructions in order to see more than 50 entries.


Amazing! Thank you very much! :raised_hands:


Can’t send announcements to yourself still.


Hello! It looks like there are broken image links in the original announcement. Any chance those could be updated? Thanks in advance! :) 


Hi @Reba Mitchell - those screenshots are now outdated actually, as we’ve continued to evolve and improve announcements since this release. Here’s an updated source of truth on announcements capabilities!