Announcements

Send updates to your event registrants via email, SMS, in their event portal, or any combination — and target by registration status, ticket type, price tier, registration path, or enrolled session.

Updated May 26, 2026

Announcements let you broadcast updates to everyone registered for an event — or a precisely filtered slice of them. Each announcement appears immediately in the attendee event portal, and you can layer email and SMS delivery on top for registrants who have given the appropriate consent.

Open the Announcements tab at /{slug}?tab=announcements to create and manage announcements for a specific event.

Creating an announcement

Fill in the New announcement form at the top of the tab. Every announcement has four main fields:

Title — required, up to 200 characters. Shown as the announcement heading in the portal and in the email/SMS subject line.
Body — required, up to 8,000 characters. Plain text; newlines are preserved when rendered.
Channels — Email, SMS, or both. Controls which channels the dispatcher attempts at send time.
Type — Transactional or Marketing. Determines which consent tier is required. See Transactional vs marketing below.

Quick templates are available above the form — they pre-fill a title, body, and channel selection for common scenarios like schedule changes or venue updates. You can edit any field after applying a template.

Audience targeting

Expand the Audience filter panel to narrow who receives the announcement. You can filter on up to five axes simultaneously:

Registration status — Confirmed, Pending, Awaiting approval, or Waitlisted. Defaults to Confirmed only.
Ticket type — limit to registrants who hold a specific ticket type.
Price tier — limit to registrants in a specific price tier.
Registration path — limit to registrants who came through a specific registration path.
Enrolled session — limit to registrants with an active RSVP to one or more sessions.

Leaving any axis empty includes everyone in that axis — a blank ticket-type filter is not "no one", it's "all ticket types". Axes combine as AND: if you select Confirmed status AND a specific ticket type, only confirmed holders of that ticket type match.

The Audience preview panel updates automatically as you adjust filters — there's a 400ms debounce so it doesn't fetch on every click. It shows the total matched registrant count, how many will receive via email, how many via SMS, and how many will be skipped because they have no consented channel. Expand the preview list to see up to 25 names with their resolved contact and channel.

The dispatcher caps dispatch at 5,000 recipients per announcement. If your filtered audience is larger than 5,000, the send goes to the first 5,000 ordered by email address — the rest are silently skipped. Events with very large confirmed lists should use multiple targeted announcements to ensure full coverage.

Transactional vs marketing

The Type field controls which consent tier Mercleo Events checks before delivering the announcement to each recipient.

Transactional announcements cover event updates, schedule changes, and emergencies. They bypass marketing consent — a registrant who opted out of marketing emails will still receive a transactional announcement. Use this type for information that directly relates to an event they are registered for.

Marketing announcements cover promotions, future events, and newsletters. They require explicit marketing consent on the channel being used. Registrants without that consent are counted in the skipped total in the audience preview.

The consent notes shown beneath the Type field are informational — they reflect what the dispatcher will enforce per recipient at send time.

Email and SMS together

When you select both Email and SMS, the dispatcher uses an SMS-first-then-email logic per recipient — not both channels at once. Each recipient gets one message:

If the recipient has SMS consent and a verified phone number, they receive an SMS.
If the recipient is not SMS-eligible, they receive an email instead (if they have the relevant email consent).
If neither channel is available, the recipient is skipped — they appear in the skipped count in the audience preview.

Selecting both channels does not send two messages to a recipient who is reachable on both. The audience preview's email and SMS counts are mutually exclusive — they always add up to the total reached.

When SMS is selected, a Test send panel appears in the form. Enter any phone number in E.164 format (e.g. +15551234567) to send the current title and body to that number immediately. The test send bypasses consent gates and does not create a recipient row — it's a smoke test for the SMS pipeline before you publish.

TCPA requires marketing SMS to be sent between 8 AM and 9 PM in the recipient's local time. When you submit a marketing SMS announcement outside that window, Mercleo Events shows a confirmation prompt — you can still send, but you'll need to confirm. The quiet-hours check uses your browser's local time as an approximation; it applies only to Marketing-type announcements over the SMS channel.

Drafts vs send now

The Send now toggle at the bottom of the form controls what happens on submit:

Send now ON — the announcement is published and dispatch to email/SMS begins immediately. The form requires at least one channel to be selected before it will submit.
Send now OFF — the announcement is saved as a draft. No channel is required. Drafts appear in the posted announcements list but are not visible to attendees in the portal and are not delivered via email or SMS.

Announcements do not have a scheduled send time. The only options are to send immediately or to save as a draft. To send at a specific time, save a draft and return to publish it when you're ready.

What attendees see

Every published announcement appears in the attendee event portal in chronological order. Attendees see all published announcements for the event regardless of which channel was used to deliver them — the portal is the canonical record.

Email and SMS are delivered on top of the portal record based on each attendee's consent and the channel selection you made. An attendee who did not receive an SMS or email (because they lacked consent) can still read the announcement in their portal.

In the posted announcements list on the operator tab, each card shows whether the announcement was emailed, texted, or both — displayed as Published · Emailed, Published · Texted, or Published · Emailed + Texted. Drafts show Draft with no delivery stamps.