Communications Topics are lists to which users can subscribe to via email or SMS.

To get started, navigate on your dashboard to the Home tab and scroll down the page to view the list of Communications Topics. You may search to find a desired topic.

Let’s get started by creating a New Communications Topic – "Airport Updates" – to which users can subscribe.

First, scroll back to the top of the page and click Create New Item > New Communications Topic.

There are two types of topics, grouped by purpose: a communications topic and Project Groups designed to group several surveys or projects. Let’s create a Communications Topic here, choosing this in the first drop-down.

Enter the topic details – in this example, we’ve selected the aviation department.

Note: The checkbox at the bottom indicates whether this topic is a public-facing signup list. In other words, it will be displayed on your organization's Public Portal for participants to sign up for updates. If you want this topic or category to be public on the Public Portal, select the checkbox and then click Create Topic.

Next, we can edit the topic settings and create sub-topics.

On the topic page, there are number of tabs: Topic, Subscribers, Email, Text and Phone.

On the Topic tab, note the Show topic on signup page slider is active. That is because we selected the corresponding checkbox when we created the topic earlier.

We can also create sub-topics for a topic or select sub-topics from a list.

These will show as customization options on your topic's live site. Subscribers will be able to specify which sub-topics they want to subscribe to, and whether they want to subscribe via SMS or email. To do this, they can click the Customize accordion drop-down and select the desired sub-topics.

A few Important Notes:

A sub-topic can only be assigned to one Parent topic. A parent topic can have many child topics.

In our example for "Airport Updates", users can also subscribe to "Neighborhood Updates" and "Airport Connections" updates.

If a user selects to receive text notifications, they will be prompted to enter their phone number.

For users to subscribe to either text or phone updates successfully, the toggles must be on for Enable Phone and Enable Text Subscriptions in their respective tabs.