Course notifications

A course can send its own emails: a heads-up when someone is added to it, a reminder before the deadline, a nudge after it has passed, and a confirmation when someone finishes. You set this up per course, in the Notifications section of the course.

Every message carries your organization's logo and colours, so it arrives looking like it came from you rather than from a tool.

#Adding a notification

Choose Add notification and fill in the rule.

• When: the moment that sets the message off. The four options are explained below.
• Tone: the wording. Friendly, Professional, Urgent, Motivational, and Concise all say the same thing in a different voice. Use Preview to see the subject, the email body, and the SMS text with your own name filled in before you commit to one.
• Repeat: optional. Send the same message again every X days until the person completes the course.
• Also notify: optional, and only for some triggers. See below.

Each rule has an Enabled switch, so you can park a rule you are not sure about instead of deleting it. Remove deletes it for good.

#The four moments

When added goes out immediately, the moment someone gets a tag that puts this course in their list, or the moment an invited person accepts and lands in the organization. This is the only rule that does not wait for the daily run. Give it a repeat and the follow-ups come every X days after that, for up to a year.

Before deadline fires a set number of days before someone's deadline. With a repeat it keeps going every X days until the deadline itself.

After deadline fires a set number of days after the deadline has passed, and with a repeat keeps going every X days for up to a year.

On completion goes out when someone finishes the course. It is also the rule that makes the certificate feel like a conclusion rather than a file that appears silently.

#Keeping a manager in the loop

Also notify adds people who get a copy when the rule fires. It is available on On completion and After deadline only, which are the two that a manager has a reason to hear about.

Only managers, administrators and owners can be added, up to twenty per rule. We check that again at the moment of sending, so someone who leaves the organization or loses their manager role stops receiving these automatically, without you having to clean up the rule.

#Rules inherited from your organization

If your organization has notification defaults, you will see them at the top of the section under Inherited from organization, with an Inherit toggle.

Leave it on and those rules fire for this course alongside the rules you add here. Turn it off and this course sends only what you set up on it. The defaults themselves are managed in one place, and the banner links straight to it.

#When a notification does not arrive

Almost every report of a missing notification comes down to one of these.

• The course is not live. Draft, scheduled for a future date, or archived courses send nothing, apart from a completion message.
• The person already finished. Reminders stop for anyone who has completed the course. That is on purpose.
• The person is not in the audience. No shared tag means no course, and no notifications about it.
• There is no deadline, so the before and after rules have nothing to count from.
• The person switched it off. Everyone can turn course notifications off in their own settings, and an administrator cannot override that. If you need proof that someone was trained, use their course history and their certificate, not the fact that an email was sent.
• SMS needs a phone number. SMS is off by default for everyone, and only reaches people who added a number to their account.

One more thing worth knowing about timing: apart from When added, notifications are sent by a daily run in the morning. A reminder for a deadline arrives that morning, not at the exact hour the deadline passes, and a rule sends at most one message per person per day.