# Publish an Announcement

Write a notice, choose who sees it and when, and take it down afterwards.

Writing and publishing are separate steps, which is what makes it safe to draft a notice in advance and date it for the morning it matters.

- Select **New Announcement**.

  ![The New Announcement screen, with the breadcrumb Worklink, Announcements, New. An Announcement section holds a required Title and a required Message box. An Audience section reads Add one or more groups, use Exclude to leave people out, with a Send to picker set to Everyone beside Exclude and Add buttons, and an empty panel underneath reading No audience yet, an announcement with no audience reaches nobody. A Delivery section holds Schedule for later, with date and time fields and the note Leave empty to send as soon as you publish, and Stop showing after with the note Leave empty to keep it up until you archive it. Cancel, Save as Draft and a blue Publish button sit at the foot.](https://www.sorviai.com/help/worklink/announcements/new-announcement.png)
- Write the **Title**. It is the line people read on their overview, so make it the message rather than a heading.
- Write the **Message**, then build the **Audience**: choose a group in **Send to** and select **Add**. **Everyone** is offered first, but nothing is targeted until you add it.
- Leave **Schedule for later** empty to send it the moment you publish, or set a date and time to have it publish itself.
- Select **Publish**, or **Save as Draft** if it is not agreed yet.

> **Warning:**
>
> **An announcement with no audience reaches nobody**
>
> The audience starts empty and the form says so in place of the list. Selecting a group in the picker is not enough on its own: it only counts once **Add** puts it in the panel below.

## Excluding people from an audience

**Exclude** adds a subtracting rule rather than a targeting one, which is how you say "everyone except one office". An audience made only of exclusions is refused, because there is nothing for them to subtract from.

## Publish now, draft, or schedule

| Choose | When | What happens |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Publish | The notice is needed today. | It appears on the targeted people's overview immediately, and each of them gets a bell notification. |
| Save as Draft | It is written but not agreed, or the date is not fixed. | Nobody outside this screen sees it, and no schedule is set. |
| Schedule for later | It is finished and belongs to a specific morning. | It publishes itself at that date and time, with nobody pressing anything. |

> **Tip:**
>
> **Schedule the predictable ones in a batch**
>
> Shutdown dates, the Christmas rota, the payroll cut-off change: these are known weeks ahead. Writing them in one sitting and dating each for when it becomes relevant is far better than remembering to post them on the day.

## Taking one down

An announcement that has served its purpose does not need deleting. Use the row's actions to unpublish or remove it from the overview, and the record stays in the list as history of what was announced and when.

> **Note:**
>
> **A bell, and nothing beyond it**
>
> Publishing puts the notice on the overview and sends one bell notification to each targeted person who has a sign-in. There is no email and no read receipt, so nothing tells you who actually read it. For anything genuinely mandatory, pair the announcement with the mechanism that does track compliance, which is a training assignment.

> **Tip:**
>
> **Keep the live list short**
>
> The overview card shows the newest few. Six live notices means the sixth is invisible, so unpublishing the ones that have passed is what keeps the rest being read.