Notify Subscribers Of New Posts

Creating a Post is your creative work. Now, let’s tell everyone about!

That's where Post notifications come in. Right from the publishing flow of any Post, you can choose to email the people who've subscribed to that Collection. This will insure that everyone is always up to date with what’s going on around your church.

Write your Post, click to publish, decide who should hear about it, and Nucleus takes care of the rest 🎉

Note: This replaces the old manual process, where you had to create and send an email yourself from the Collection's Smart Campaign. You can still send manual emails anytime you want, this just saves you from having to.

To get started, go to Posts in your Dashboard, open the Post you want to publish, and click Publish.

In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.

What Are Smart Campaigns

Smart Campaigns are a part of Nucleus Messages. Whereas you can manually create a Campaign in Messages, Smart Campaigns are automatically created for you, based on other aspects of your Nucleus account. For instance, if you create a Flow, a Smart Campaign is created so that you can send an email to anyone who has submitted through that particular Flow. The same is true of Collections in Nucleus Posts. When you create a Collection, a Smart Campaign is automatically created for you, so you can manage and message your subscribers of that particular Collection.

Note: Unlike regular Campaigns in Nucleus Messages, Smart Campaigns are always automatically active and live. You can always pause a Smart Campaign, but there's no need to initially activate it.

How Post Notifications Work

A Post notification is simply an email letting your subscribers know there's something new to read. The notification is sent through your Smart Campaign that is tied to the Collection where your Post exists.

When you choose to notify subscribers, Nucleus creates one email per Campaign you select and schedules it to send about five minutes after your Post publishes. That short delay is intentional. It's your safety net. If you publish and immediately realize you spelled your pastor's name wrong (we've all been there 🙈), you have a few minutes to undo everything before a single email leaves the building.

The email itself is built for you, pulling in your Post's title and creating the direct link, along with any personal note that you choose to add. Your Post Hub colors carry through, so it looks like it came from your church.

Note: Notifications are only created when you walk through the publish steps on an individual Post. If you publish several Posts at once using bulk actions, no notifications are sent. That's on purpose of course, because nobody wants to accidentally fire off six emails with one click 😬

Choose Who Receives Your Notification

By default, a notification goes to the Smart Campaign for the Collection your Post lives in. That's the list of people who subscribed to that specific Collection, so it's almost always the right audience.

But you're not limited to just that list. In Posts > Collections, open a Collection and go to Settings. There you can connect additional Campaigns. Then, with each new Post you publish, you can manually choose which audience should receive a notification. (See below more on that.)


Any Campaign you've marked to receive notifications will show up as an option during the publish steps, so you can include or exclude it Post by Post.

Send A Notification When You Publish

When you're ready to publish, click Publish on your Post and you'll be walked through a few short steps.

1. Decide whether to notify

First, Nucleus asks whether you want to send a notification. For a Post you've never published before, this defaults to Yes, which is usually what you want.

If you'd rather publish quietly (say, you're fixing a typo on a Post from last week), choose No, just publish the post.

2. Write your note and set your sender

Here you can add a short personal note that appears in the email, and customize the sender name, reply-to address, and subject line. Each of these defaults to your Collection's settings, so you only need to touch them if you want something different for this particular Post.

Note: Keep your note brief. Your subscribers are already getting the Post title, image, and a link to read the whole thing. A sentence or two of context is plenty. We allow for up to 500 characters.

3. Choose who to send to

Next, pick your Campaigns. The Collection's Smart Campaign is selected for you, and any additional Campaigns you've connected in that Collection's Settings will be listed here too.

4. Adjust sender & subject

Nucleus will pull the default sender name, sender email, and reply-to email from your default settings in your Smart Campaign for this Collection; along with using the name of the Post for the subject line. You can adjust any of these for this particular email notification.

5. Publish your Post

The final step is choosing whether to publish the Post right away or to schedule it to publish in the future. These publishing options are exactly the same as any other publishable content across the Nucleus platform.

6. Review your summary

Once you've published (or scheduled to publish your Post), on top of the typical options of going back to all Posts or continuing to edit the Post in question, you can click to view the email that will be sent to your audience(s) in about 5 minutes.

Clicking View it here will take you directly to the email in that Post's Smart Campaign in Nucleus Messages.

Publishing And The 5-Minute Window

Scheduling a Post works exactly the way you'd hope: the notification follows the Post.

If you schedule a Post for Sunday at 6:00 a.m., your subscribers get their email at 6:05 a.m. Sunday - five minutes after the Post actually goes live, so nobody clicks a link to a Post that isn't there yet.

That five-minute buffer applies to immediate publishing too. Click Publish Now and the email is queued for five minutes from then, giving you a window to catch anything you missed.

Note: If a Post's Collection doesn't have any Campaigns selected, no notification is created. Your Post still publishes normally - there's just nobody to email.

Clicking View it here will take you directly to the email in that Post's Smart Campaign in Nucleus Messages.

Here, you can preview what the email looks like, but more importantly, you can cancel the email notification from sending if it's still within that 5-minute window.

Scheduling A Publish And An Unpublish Together

On the last step of publishing, you can schedule both when a Post goes live and when it comes back down.

When you schedule both at once, Nucleus checks whether the notification would still make sense:

  • If the email would send while the Post is still live, it sends as planned.
  • If the Post would already be unpublished by the time the email went out, the notification is cancelled.

In other words, we'll never email your church a link to a Post that's no longer there 🙂

So if you schedule a Post to publish Friday morning and unpublish Sunday night, your subscribers get their email Friday at five past. But if you schedule a Post to publish and unpublish within the same five minutes, the notification is dropped. (While the likelihood that you're doing that is pretty low, it's nice to know the safeguard is there just in case 😁)

Changing Or Cancelling A Scheduled Post

Plans change. Here's what happens to a notification that hasn't sent yet.

Changing the publish time

Move the publish time and the unsent notification moves with it, landing five minutes after the new publish time. Your note, sender details, and selected Campaigns all come along, so there’s no need to set them up again.

Cancelling a scheduled publish

If you cancel the schedule, the unsent notification is cancelled too. Nothing goes out.

If the Post was already live and you were only scheduling an update to it, the Post stays published and any emails you sent previously stay in your subscribers' inboxes. Only the unsent notification for that scheduled update is cancelled.

Unpublishing or archiving

Unpublishing or archiving a Post cancels every notification that hasn't sent yet.

Note: Emails that have already gone out can never be recalled. Once a notification is delivered, it's in your subscribers' inboxes for good, just like any other email. Unpublishing the Post only stops what hasn't sent yet.

Publishing The Same Post Again

Sometimes you need to publish a Post more than once. Maybe you fixed a broken link, updated a date, or added a photo.

When you publish a Post that has already sent a notification, Nucleus shows you a card letting you know a notification was already sent to subscribers and when it was initially sent. In that case, the default flips to No, just publish the post, so you don't accidentally email everyone twice.

You can still send another notification if you genuinely need to—an emergency correction, a cancellation, a change everyone needs to know about. If you choose to, Nucleus will warn you first, because a second email about the same Post is a common reason people unsubscribe or mark messages as spam.

Generally speaking: one notification per Post is the healthiest habit for your sending reputation, and for your church's inbox 😌

Note: If you publish again and choose to send a new notification, any notification that hasn't sent yet is replaced by the new one. This keeps an older version of your Post from being emailed out alongside the updated one.

Find Your Notifications In Messages

Every notification you send lives in Nucleus Messages, right alongside your other emails.

Go to Messages > Smart Campaigns, select Posts in the left sidebar, and open the Campaign you sent to. Then click Emails and choose the From Apps tab. Click here for a quick link.

This tab lists every email that Nucleus Posts has scheduled or sent to that Campaign, so you can see exactly what went out and when. From here you can:

  • Cancel Send on a notification that hasn't gone out yet
  • View Results on one that has, to see opens, clicks, and delivery details

Note: Because these emails are created by Nucleus Posts, you can't open them in the full email editor the way you would a Campaign email you wrote yourself. Everything you need to customize is handled during the publish steps on your Post.

What Next?

Now that your subscribers get notified automatically, it's worth making sure the rest of your Collection experience is set up well. A great welcome email and a solid subscribe form go a long way 👇

Otherwise, these guides will help you get more out of Nucleus Posts as a whole:

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