The News Feed tool lets you provide dynamic content updates to your participants during the lifecycle of a project. It is a powerful tool to continuously engage your audience throughout your project, keeping them involved and helping to build familiarity, buy-in and trust.

Developing a practice of using the News Feed and providing regular updates is one of the most important things you can do to achieve mastery of digital engagement.

You can use the News Feed in a variety of ways, including:

  • delivering important project information
  • letting people know of a change to the project timeline (such as a delay)
  • providing reflections on a project's development and progress (when used as a project blog)
  • issuing notifications and reminders (such as when a survey is about to close)
  • reporting findings back to participants to 'close the loop'.

The News Feed tool works in conjunction with Social Pinpoint's 'Follow' feature (if available in your plan), allowing you to notify your Followers via email when you publish a news item. This feature provides an easy, automated way to communicate back to your Followers, saving you considerable time and effort.

You can add the News Feed tool at the project level to any page. However, the content of the feed will always be the same for each project, even if you add multiple News Feeds to that project.

The News Feed can also be configured to aggregate news items from multiple projects showing items from related projects, locations or categories, or even pulling items from all projects into a single feed on your homepage.

To add a new item to the News Feed, you must create a News page in the project. The News Feed then finds all the relevant 'News' pages and displays them in the feed. You can configure several settings in the News Feed to control how the News Feed appears to your participants.

You can add any content you'd like to a News page, even participation tools. This gives you the flexibility to be creative. For example, you could send out a news update containing a Quick Poll to get feedback on an event you recently held or add a Conversation to drive discussion around a particular announcement.

💡USER TIP: Both the Project and News Page needs to be published in order to be viewed on the News Feed.

🖼️ Examples

Here's some examples of how you can configure the News Feed:


This is a 'Panel - small' style with image thumbnails turned on. It also uses the 'Progressive' loading setting to allow user to view more items.


This is a 'Carousel' style with the description field turned off so it appears clean. Users can scroll the carousel to see more items.


This is a simple 'List' style that aggregates news items from around the site. The 'Display Project Titles' setting is enabled to show the name of the project.

⚙️Settings

Settings you can configure in the News Feed:

Basic

  • Block Title - gives the News Feed an optional title, limited to 70 characters.
  • Block Description - gives the News Feed an optional description that appears below the title, limited to 170 characters.

Filters

  • Project Filter - shows news items from a single, defined project.
  • Project Status Filter - shows news items based on their Status: 'Open', 'Closed' or 'Active'. Only one Project Status value can be selected.
  • Project Type Filter - shows news items based on their Project Type: 'Public' or 'Private'. Only one Project Type value can be selected.
  • Project Category Filter - shows news items based on a defined Project Category (e.g. 'Open Space, 'Arts and Culture', 'Health and Wellbeing', etc.). Multiple Project Categories can be selected.
  • Project Location Filter - shows news items based on a defined Project Location (e.g. 'Location A', 'Location B', 'Location C', etc.). Multiple Project Locations can be selected.
  • Date Range - shows news items published between a specified date range.

Display

  • Display Type - selects the visual style of the News Feed: 'List', 'Card', 'Panel (small)', 'Panel (large)' or 'Carousel', and the number of columns news items will appear in on large devices (if applicable to the Display Type).
  • Show Thumbnails - displays an image thumbnail for each news item in the News Feed. If no image has been added to the News Item and this setting is enabled, a placeholder image will be used.
  • Display Description - allows you to show or hide the description of the news items appearing the News Feed. This can be useful for aesthetic reasons.
  • Display Call to Action - allows you to show or hide the call to action link at the end of the news item, and customise the text used for all call to action links in the News Feed.
  • Display Project Title - allows you to show or hide the title of the news items appearing in the News Feed. This option is useful if you are aggregating news items from different projects. Clicking the Project Title on the news item will bring the user to the project page.
  • Display Items - allows you to choose how many news items will be shown in the News Feed and the method for loading additional items. The following options can be selected:
    • Fixed- shows a fixed number of news items as specified in the ‘Number of news items’ field
    • Progressive- shows a fixed number of news items as specified in the ‘Number of news items’ field and adds a ‘show more’ button at the bottom of the News Feed to allow users to load more news items (if available). This option is useful for when there are many news items but you do not want the News Feed to occupy too much space on a page.
  • Sorting - allows you to choose the order that news items will appear in the News Feed based on their Public Date/Time. You can choose to order news items by 'Most recent first' (newer items will appear at the top of the News Feed), or 'Earliest first' (older items will appear at the top of the News Feed).

🎯 Key Actions

Key actions you can perform in the News Feed:

Before you get started posting news to your projects, you'll first need to add a News Feed to a project page.

To add the News Feed:

  1. Drag the News Feed tool from the toolbox and drop it into the target area.
  2. Configure the Block Settings as desired.
  3. Select the blue 'Save' button to add the News Feed to the page. The feed will appear empty until you add and publish News pages.

You can modify the visual style of the News Feed and its news items by adjusting several settings located in the 'Display' tab of the Block Settings.

The 'Display Type' setting provides five different styles for the News Feed:

  • List - Displays all news items in a simple list.
  • Card - Displays all news items as a 'portrait' card element (similar to the Feature Grid or Project Card) and is suited for larger Content Areas.
  • List (small) - Displays all news items as a 'landscape' card element and is suited for smaller Content Areas (such as a Sidebar).
  • List (large) - Displays all news items as a 'landscape' card element and is suited for larger Content Areas.
  • Carousel - Displays all news items as a 'portrait' card element within a revolving, user-controlled gallery.

You can control how many news items will appear in the feed by adjusting the 'Display Items' setting. You can show a set number of items, such as showing only the most recent 5 items (Fixed), or show a fixed number of items and allow users to see more by clicking a 'show more' button (Progressive).

If you want to control what information appears in the news items of the feed, you can choose to show or hide the 'Title', 'Description' and 'Call to action' links.

If showing the 'Call to action' link, you can also customise the call to action text if required. Typically, this will say 'read more', 'learn more', 'see more', etc.

To add a news item to a News Feed, you must first create a News page and publish it under your project. The News Feed looks for relevant News pages that match any 'filters' you have set and displays them in the feed.

To add a news item to a News Feed:

  1. Navigate to the project you want to associate the news item with, then select the 'Megaphone' icon at the top-left of the Toolbar to automatically create a new News page.
  2. Fill out the details such as 'Title', 'Description', 'Publish Date' and add an Image 'Thumbnail' if desired. When finished, select the 'Save Changes' button at the bottom right of the page to create a draft News Page.
  3. Add your content to the News page as desired. You can add any tools to the page, including participation tools. When finished, you can either save the page as a draft or publish the page.
  4. Once published, a news item will appear in the News Feed and link to the associated News page. You can adjust the news feed content, such as the 'Title' or 'Description', by editing the associated news page's 'Details'.

💡NOTE: Public Date/Time is not the actual publishing date of the page but serves to display a specific date in the news page header.

You can add images to your news items to provide visual interest and capture your participant's interest. This setting adds a small image thumbnail to each news item.

To add an image to news items:

  1. Enable the 'Image Thumbnails' setting within the Block Settings of the News Feed.
  2. Open the 'Settings' of a News page, select 'Choose File' under the 'Image Thumbnail' heading, then click 'Save Changes' or 'Publish Changes'.

The image's size and position will depend on the 'Display Type' you select in the News Feed settings.

If you do not add an image but enable the 'Image Thumbnails' setting, a placeholder image will show instead.

To delete a news item, simply navigate to the relevant News page, click 'Settings' from the Toolbar at the top of the page, and select 'Delete Page'.

If you have the 'Follow' feature enabled on a project, you can easily notify your 'Followers' when you publish a news item to a News Feed.

To notify your Followers when a news item is published:

  1. Navigate to the Settings of the News Page and click the option to 'Send an Automatic email'. If setting a News page up for the first time, you will automatically see this setting when creating the page.
  2. Add any custom text content you want to insert into the default email template.
  3. After you have finished adding content to your News page, publish the page to create and schedule an email campaign.

The email campaign generated through this method will not send straight away. Instead, there is a delay of 3 hours (subject to your site's configuration) to prevent email campaigns from being sent if a user accidentally publishes this page.

If you want to cancel the campaign from sending during this period, you can manually cancel it via the Emails area of the Dashboard or simply move the News page back to Draft.

You can only send one email campaign to your Followers per News page and cannot send a campaign after the page is published. If you want to notify your followers of the update but have already published the page without sending an automated campaign, you can still send a manual campaign via the Emails area of the Dashboard.

The News Feed gives you the option to control which news items appear in the feed. By default, adding a News Feed to a project page only shows news items associated with that project. In other words, only news pages published under that project in the Sitemap will appear.


If you want your News Feed to show more than just the updates from a single project, you can apply various 'filters' to pull in news items from multiple projects. You can also filter by other attributes, such as the status of the project or the date range.

For example, you can use filters to show all news updates from the 'Climate Change' category or even show all recent news items from around your site on the homepage.

Filters are located in the 'Filters' tab of the Block Settings and allow the News Feed to be filtered by: Project, Project Status, Project Type, Project Category, Project Location and Date Range.

Filters use the 'and' operator, meaning all conditions you set in the filters must be 'true' for the news items to appear.

For example, if you enable the 'Project Location' filter and select 'Location A' as a value, and also enable the 'Project Category' filter and select 'Arts and Culture' as a value, only news items from projects associated with both 'Location A' and 'Arts and Culture' will appear.


If all filters are disabled, then all news items from across your site are shown. You can use this to create a sitewide News Feed on either the homepage or a designated news page on your site.