Announcements

Send a one-off message to everyone in your organization, or to chosen groups, through the Herd Slack or Teams bot — with a headcount check, a preview, and a record of every send.

Overview

Announcements are organization-wide messages sent through the Herd bot with nothing attached to them: an incident update, a policy change, a security bulletin — anything the security team needs in front of people, without it being a training nudge. Each person gets the message in Slack where they have it, in Teams otherwise, and by email if they have neither.

To open it, expand Messaging under Manage in the left-hand sidebar and click Announcements. It sits beside Reminders.

Sending needs the Send announcements permission (listed under Communications in the permission picker). It is deliberately separate from organization settings and from training or compliance permissions, and no role template grants it automatically — an admin has to add it to the group that should be able to announce. Admins always have it. See Managing Roles, Groups, and Permissions.

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Sending an announcement

The New announcement form has three fields:

• Name — for your records; recipients never see it.

• Audience — Everyone in the organization, or Specific groups. With Specific groups selected, search your Herd groups and tick the ones to include.

• Message — the text people receive. Slack formatting works: *bold*, _italic_, `code`, and <https://link|text>. A preview beneath the field shows the message in the real Slack or Teams window, exactly as it will land.

Before you can send, click Check audience. Herd resolves the audience and tells you how many people it reaches, how many of those have no Slack or Teams account and get it by email, and how many have no chat account or email address and will be recorded as skipped, with a sample of the people included. If you change the audience afterwards, you check it again; Send now stays disabled until the current audience has been checked. A very large audience is refused with This audience is too large for a single announcement. Send it to fewer groups at a time.

Click Send now and confirm in the Send this to everyone selected? dialog. Delivery is immediate: there is no scheduling, recurrence, or template library. Announcements honour the same suppression rules as training reminders, so anyone on leave or with notifications snoozed is skipped, and an organization on a custom-branded Slack app sends from that app.

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The Sent history

Below the form, Sent lists what went out, to whom, and when. Each entry shows the announcement's name, when it was sent and by whom, the audience (Everyone or the group names), the recipient count, the message body, and the delivery outcome. View recipients expands the per-person delivery result for that send (people who got it by email show EMAIL); Load more pages through older entries.

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Related

• Reminders — for something people need to finish, with follow-up until they do.

• Nudges — reminders for Herd's own trainings, tracks, policies, and campaigns.