Announcements let you create news articles and updates to share with your members. You have full control over who sees each announcement and how it's delivered — publish immediately or schedule for later, target all members or specific membership tiers, and share via the portal, email, or your website.
Creating Announcements
Create announcements from the admin portal under Announcements. Each announcement includes:
- Title — the headline for your announcement
- Content — a rich content editor supporting formatted text, headings, lists, images, tables, embedded PDFs, and rich links with preview images, titles, and descriptions
- Featured image — upload a photo, choose a gradient, generate one with AI, or search Unsplash
- File attachment — optionally attach a downloadable file alongside the announcement (any file type, stored securely)
Audience Targeting
You can control who sees each announcement:
- All members — visible to everyone with an active membership (the default)
- Specific membership tiers — target only members of selected membership levels. Members outside the targeted tiers won't see the announcement.
This targeting is preserved when you convert an announcement to an email — the email will be sent to the same audience.
Scheduling and Expiration
Publish Immediately or Schedule
You can publish announcements immediately or schedule them for a future date and time. Scheduled announcements remain in draft until the publish date arrives, then automatically become visible to the targeted audience.
Expiration
Optionally set an expiration date. Once expired, the announcement is automatically hidden from the announcements list and member dashboards. This is useful for time-sensitive updates that shouldn't linger.
Publishing Workflow
Announcements follow Orbit's standard draft/publish/archive workflow, with additional support for scheduled publishing and expiration dates. See Publishing Workflow for details.
Viewing Announcements
Announcements List
Members see a paginated list of all published announcements from their announcements page, ordered by publish date (newest first). The list is searchable and can be filtered by status.
Announcement Detail
Each announcement has its own page with the full content, featured image, and any file attachments with a download button. Previous/next navigation links let members browse through announcements in order.
Member Dashboard
You can highlight announcements on the member dashboard with two portal widgets:
- Announcements summary — shows total published announcements and unread count for the logged-in member
- Featured announcement — display a specific announcement or automatically show the most recent published one. The widget shows the title, publish date, a content preview, and a "Read More" link. Admins can configure which announcement to feature.
Sharing and Promotion
Announcements can be shared via email, social media, or embedded on your website. When sent as email, audience targeting is preserved — the email is sent to the same members or tiers as the announcement. See Sharing & Promotion for details.
Importing Announcements
You can import existing announcements in several ways:
- Spreadsheet import — import via CSV or Excel with fields for title, content (Markdown format), targeting, status, and publish/expiry dates. Export existing announcements first to see the required format.
- URL import — paste a link to a public announcement or article on another website and Orbit will extract the title, content, and publish date.
- Paste and analyze — copy and paste text content, and the tool will analyze it to build a formatted title and description.
Analytics
Built-in analytics track views, traffic sources, and read counts for each announcement. See Per-Feature Analytics for details.