Planning communications with the comms calendar

What the comms calendar is

The comms calendar is your communications planning board. It is a month-at-a-time wall calendar where you log every planned communication: updates, town halls, contests, social posts, and more. You can schedule recurring items, attach files, and set email reminders so nothing slips.

It is one shared, union-wide calendar. There is no per-region split, and there is no public or shareable calendar link.

Access comes in two levels, both granted in Role Management. Administrators get full management: browse, search, create, edit, delete, and triage suggestions. Regional VPs get view and suggest: they can browse the whole calendar, search it, and submit suggestions, but cannot add, edit, or delete entries. Everyone else sees a message that they do not have access, with a button back to the Dashboard.

Browsing, types, and the legend

The month grid shows full Sunday to Saturday weeks. Days that spill over from the previous or next month appear dimmed but are still clickable. Today is highlighted with a blue border, computed in your union's configured time zone rather than your device's. Inside each day cell you see one colored dot per entry, up to five, with a +N counter when there are more. Hovering a dot shows the entry's title or its type label if it is untitled. A green center dot means that entry is marked Completed, and empty days show a small dash. Visited months are cached and adjacent months are pre-fetched, so paging back and forth is instant.

Every entry has a type, and each type has a fixed color shown in the Legend panel above the grid. The available types and their colors are set per deployment, so a Recurring Update may show as a dark dot with a contrast ring while other types each get their own color. The Legend always reflects exactly what your deployment uses. There is no in-app screen for renaming types or recoloring the legend; that is a deployment configuration change made outside the app.

On phones the week grid is replaced by a compact mini-month plus an agenda list of the days that have entries. Tapping either opens the same day view. The search box above the legend reaches every communication by title and body, across all months and years, so you never have to page around. Matching ignores accents, a recurring series appears once marked Recurring, and clicking a result jumps straight to that day.

1. 1Step through months with Prev and Next, or jump anywhere with the Month dropdown and Year box (1990 to 2100).
2. 2Use This month to return to the current month (on narrow screens, use the Month and Year controls instead).
3. 3Read the Legend panel to learn what each entry color means in your deployment.
4. 4Type two or more characters in the search box to open a ranked drop-down of matches, then click a result to jump to that day.

Adding and editing an entry

Click any day to open its day view. Administrators see Add Communication, which opens the entry editor for a new entry on that day. The day view lists the day's entries with their type dot, title, scheduled time, and a short preview. Administrators get an Open button per entry; Regional VPs see entries read-only.

The editor has a Type, a Date, a Completed checkbox, an optional Scheduled time, a required Title, free-text Content, and rows of links added with Add link row. Only links starting with http or https are kept on save. A title is required, and an invalid time is rejected. Each entry records who created it and who last edited it.

Deleting now lives inside the editor. The Delete button asks to confirm and permanently removes the entry and all its attached files. When you create a new entry you briefly see Saving, then the modal closes and files upload in the background. When you edit, the modal closes immediately and the save runs in the background.

1. 1Click a day cell, then click Add Communication.
2. 2Pick a Type, confirm the Date, and enter a Title and Content.
3. 3Optionally tick Completed, set a Scheduled time, and add link rows with Add link row.
4. 4Use Add files to attach documents, then click Save.
5. 5To remove an entry, open it and click Delete, then confirm.

Recurring updates

Recurring Update is the only type that repeats. It is stored once as a series anchor, and the calendar draws one dot per occurrence generated from the schedule. Choosing this type reveals the Recurrence schedule; switching away from it discards the schedule.

There is no per-occurrence editing. Opening any occurrence edits the whole series, and Delete inside the editor removes the entire series and its attachments. The Completed flag and attachments live on the series, so they appear on every occurrence. To skip or end dates, adjust the schedule rather than a single date.

A Next occurrences preview lists up to the next 14 generated dates so you can sanity-check the rule before saving.

1. 1Set Type to Recurring Update to reveal the Recurrence schedule.
2. 2Pick a Repeat pattern: Yearly on one date, Yearly on multiple dates, Monthly by day of month (days 28 to 31 clamp to the last day in shorter months), Weekly by weekday, or Specific dates only.
3. 3Set Every N weeks, months, or years (1 to 12) as your skip control, except for the specific-dates list.
4. 4Set Effective from to start the series, and an optional End date to stop it.
5. 5Check the Next occurrences preview, then Save.

Attachments and filing sent mass emails

Use Add files in the editor to upload one or more files at once. Any file type is accepted, each file may be at most 25 MB, and file names are sanitized on upload. In the editor's Attachments list, click a file name to open it in a new tab; download links are short-lived, so just click the name again if one expires. Click Remove next to a file and confirm to delete it.

Deleting an entry deletes its attachments too. Attachments are not attached to reminder emails; the reminder links back to the calendar instead.

After you send a mass email from Members, administrators get a panel asking to add it to the comms calendar. Choose Add to calendar to attach the email to one of today's communications or create a new one. Either way the app generates a PDF and a Word copy of the email and attaches both, a permanent record with no manual steps. Regional VPs can send mass email but do not see this panel.

1. 1In the editor, click Add files and pick one or more files (up to 25 MB each).
2. 2Click a file name in the Attachments list to open it.
3. 3Click Remove beside a file and confirm to delete it.
4. 4After a mass email, choose Add to calendar and either attach it to a today entry or create one with a title and type.

Email reminders

Each entry can send a one-time reminder email. Tick Email reminder in the editor to choose the send date (before, on, or after the event date), a time zone pre-filled from your browser, the hour, minute, and AM or PM, and the recipients. List recipients one per line or separated by commas or semicolons; invalid ones are dropped and at most 30 are kept. A live countdown shows when the reminder will fire.

A scheduled background job your administrator sets up checks for due reminders and sends each on the first run at or after its scheduled instant, so the job frequency sets the precision. Reminders more than 7 days overdue are skipped rather than sent stale. Recipients are exactly the addresses on the entry, and each person gets an individual email.

A reminder sends exactly once. Changing the event date before it sends recomputes the send time; after it sends, the sent state is preserved to avoid duplicates. A recurring series carries one reminder at one fixed instant, so reminders do not repeat per occurrence.

1. 1Tick Email reminder in the editor.
2. 2Set the send date, time zone, hour, minute, and AM or PM.
3. 3Add at least one recipient email, one per line.
4. 4Check the live countdown, then Save the entry.

Suggestions, completion, and limits

The calendar doubles as a shared idea box. A Suggestions button, showing the count of open ideas, sits beside the search box and opens a side panel. Anyone with calendar access can submit a suggestion: a title, plus an optional date, type, and details. Regional VPs can also start one pre-dated to a specific day using the Suggest a communication button in that day's view. Open suggestions appear as cards with the title, suggested date, type, who submitted it, and any details. Administrators can Promote a card to open the entry editor pre-filled from the suggestion, or Dismiss it without creating an entry.

There is no separate archive; the calendar itself is the historical record. Use the Completed checkbox to mark an entry done, which adds the green center dot but keeps it on its date. Past months stay fully browsable, back to 1990 via the Year box, with all entries, attachments, and content intact. The only way an entry leaves the calendar is Delete, which is permanent and removes its attachments too.

There is currently no iCal feed, no calendar-app subscription, and no CSV or PDF export of the calendar itself, although individual entry attachments download normally. The reminder email and the link inside it are the only outbound notifications; creating, editing, completing, or suggesting entries does not notify anyone by itself.

1. 1Open the Suggestions panel beside the search box and submit a suggestion with a title and optional date, type, and details.
2. 2As an administrator, click Promote to open the entry editor pre-filled from the suggestion, then adjust and Save to create the real communication.
3. 3Click Dismiss to clear a suggestion without creating an entry.
4. 4Tick Completed to mark an entry done, or use Delete to remove an entry permanently.