Add an Announcement
- Tevra Wood
- Oziel Rico (Unlicensed)
- EMS Accounts (Unlicensed)
- Francine Gair (Unlicensed)
The Catapult Announcement feature helps users collate and distribute information on the homepages of their district and schools. The Announcement feature gives you the ability to prioritize announcements, integrate with social media and post news directly from your mobile device. Districts can also push important announcements to their school sites.
Instructions
To add an announcement:
Login to your Catapult CMS account.
Click on Announcements at top of page:
or click on Announcements/Blog on the Dashboard:
3. If you have access to multiple school sites, you will need to find your school site and click Load Announcements:
If you have access to only one site, you will go straight in to your editing screen.
4. Select a Feed: The first time you login, you will also need to select which feed you are accessing. Most districts have only one feed for the homepage of each site; however, the software has the capability to integrate multiple feeds, such as District, School and Athletics announcement feeds.
5. Click New Post and add information, using the following instructions.
Post Details:
Title:
A title is required. You will want to add something eye-catching, if possible.
Post Status:
When selecting your post status you will be given three options to choose from: Active, Draft, and Scheduled. An Active post means that it will be live immediately after it is created. A draft is simply a post that isn’t quite ready to be live yet. Scheduled posts will become live once you select your desired dates and times. Once you have decided on which content you would like to be live on your feed, your posts will be ordered chronologically by post date with the newest post showing first.
Priority Active:
The priority toggle allows you to overwrite the default order and set your priority item at the top of the post.
You can set your priority setting to Top, Mid, Low priority if your site is a district. If you are a school site, you will only have mid to low priority. Your district can post items above your posts. If you are wondering how a post got on your page, someone at the district probably wants it there.
Post to School Sites:
If you are a district, you can post important posts to your school sites. We suggest you only push posts to the school sites that are important district wide notifications. Otherwise, we recommend you allow schools to update their own announcements.
Feeds:
Although most schools have one main announcement feed on their landing page, you are welcome to use the announcement feature and add additional feeds throughout your website. Some examples of additional feeds would be: job boards, sporting events or activities, and after school events.
Categories
You can also add categories to you post, which will allow your post to be sorted more accurately. For example, if your announcement post is about an upcoming sporting event you may want to include ‘sports’ and/or ‘after school’ to your categories list.
Content
After inputting all of the basic information to get your post set up for success, you are now ready to add the content! You can add text, pictures, videos, and/or documents to your post depending on what you are trying to achieve. Make sure when adding any attachments you hit ‘save’ before continuing or that attachment will not show up in your post once it is ready to be live. Also note that any pictures or visuals require a simple alt tag description in order to remain ADA compliant!
When you are done, hit SAVE POST and your announcement will be automatically added to your announcement feed on your websites.
Sharing to Social Media
Finally, if you would like to share to social media, hit share post and select Facebook or Twitter. The first time you do this, make sure you allow popups from this site and share as a page.
Remember all of this is mobile responsive and can be used from your cell phone!
After you create a post…
Remember, you will be shown two options on the right side of each individual announcement post and these are: Edit Post and Delete Post. So if you need to make any changes or adjustments you can hit ‘edit’ and go right back into your post. If you wish to permanently delete a post altogether you can do so easily with the 'delete post' button.