Posting an announcement

An announcement is a plain-text message from your staff to a set of people, delivered to the churchHQ app. The sidebar item is Announcements and the page lives at /updates, so you will see both words.

Write and post

1. 1

   Open Announcements

   Click Announcements in the sidebar. The New update card sits at the top, under the line "Easily notify your teams of important updates. Pick who sees it, then write your message."

2. 2

   Pick who it goes to

   Tap one or more of the chips on the first row: Everyone at {your church name}, All leaders, and Everyone serving {date}. For anything narrower, click Add teams or groups… and use the Search teams and groups… field. That popover stays open while you toggle, so you can pick several in one go, and each pick lands as a removable dark chip below the row.

3. 3

   Write the message

   Type in the Write your update… box. Plain text, up to 5000 characters. Line breaks survive; bold, links, and images do not.

4. 4

   Attach a page, if it helps

   Attach a group or service links one existing Scout page to the post. Services lists the next eight upcoming published services; Groups lists your active groups. One attachment per post.

5. 5

   Post it

   Click Post update. The line beside the button counts you in: it reads Pick at least one audience until you choose one, then N audiences selected, then Posted to N people.

Check that it landed

Every post shows up under Recent updates with its author, audience labels, and time. Click the Seen 4/12 link on a card to open the Who's seen it panel: three counts across the top (N seen, N acknowledged, N total), then the roster with people who have not seen it first, under Haven't seen it (N).

Read those two numbers differently. Opening the Updates tab marks every post in the feed as seen at once, so Seen means the person had their feed open. Got it is the acknowledge button, and it is the only number that means someone deliberately responded.

The panel is a roster and nothing more. There is no nudge, no resend, and no reminder button attached to it.

What you cannot do after you post

This is the part worth reading before your first announcement rather than after it.

• No editing. There is no edit control on a posted update. A typo means deleting and posting again, which resets every seen and acknowledged count.
• No changing who it went to. The audience is fixed at post time.
• No unsend. The trash icon (Delete update) opens a confirm dialog and soft-deletes the post, which pulls it from every recipient's feed. A push notification that already landed on someone's lock screen stays there.
• No scheduling. There is no send-later and no "post at 8am Sunday".
• No subject line. The push notification's title is the first audience label, and its body is your message cut to 139 characters.

Who is allowed to post

Posting needs the Post church updates permission (post_updates), listed under Outreach in Settings → Permissions. Admin, Pastor, and Staff hold it by default. Finance and Volunteer do not.

The page itself is not gated. Someone without the permission still sees Announcements in the sidebar, still writes a message, and gets a failure when they post. If a staff member reports that posting does nothing, check their role first. See What each permission controls.

Every post, and every delete, is written to Settings → Audit log.

Next

• Who receives an announcement explains why the recipient count is smaller than your congregation.
• Letting leaders post to their own team covers the version of this that runs on a leader's phone.