Summary
Engage (CampaignOS) is the sending engine: audiences built from real platform data, messages, journeys that run over time, and the consent and suppression machinery that decides who may actually be contacted.
Two things to understand before you send anything:
- Consent is enforced, not advisory. Every send passes a consent gate. A person who has not consented to a topic does not receive it, regardless of what the audience query returned.
- Email is the primary channel. WhatsApp is not currently active on the platform. Plan campaigns as email-first.
Who This Guide Is For
- Administrators and marketing staff who communicate with learners
- Operations managers running reminders and nudges
- Anyone about to send to more than a handful of people
Step 1: Set the Topics
Navigate to Engage → Settings.
A topic is a category of communication people consent to separately — announcements, results, marketing, events. Keeping them separate means somebody can stop marketing without stopping results.
Step 2: Understand Consent and Suppression
Navigate to Engage → Consent.
Consent is per person, per topic. Suppression is stronger: a suppressed address does not receive anything at all, usually because it bounced hard or the person complained.
Warning: Never create a suppression manually against an address that still works. Suppressions can apply platform-wide, and suppressing a routable address blocks it for every tenant on the platform, not only yours.
Step 3: Build an Audience
Navigate to Engage → Audiences.
An audience is a rule over platform data — a cohort, a programme, applicants who have not responded, learners with outstanding evidence. Build it from rules rather than from an uploaded list, so it is right tomorrow as well as today.
Preview the audience before you use it. The preview shows how many people the rules match and how many of those the consent gate will actually allow.
Step 4: Write the Content
Navigate to Engage → Content.
Write the message. Where the content makes a marketing claim, it should have come through GrowthOS with its evidence — Engage sends, it does not adjudicate claims.
Step 5: Send a Campaign
Navigate to Engage → Campaigns.
A campaign pairs content with an audience. Send yourself a test first, every time. Then send.
Read the result: delivered, opened, bounced, complained. Hard bounces become suppressions automatically, which is the correct behaviour and another reason not to create them by hand.
Step 6: Automate with Journeys
Navigate to Engage → Journeys.
A journey is a sequence triggered by something happening — an application submitted, a cohort starting, an absence streak. Journeys are where most of the value is, because they run without anybody remembering to run them.
Start with one journey, watch it for a fortnight, then add the second.
Step 7: Digests
Navigate to Engage → Digests.
A digest batches several notifications into one scheduled message. Use them for anything routine and frequent. The alternative is that people learn to ignore your email, which is expensive and hard to undo.
What Good Looks Like
- Topics are separated so people can opt out of some things without all things
- Audiences are rules, not uploaded lists
- Every campaign was tested to a real inbox first
- Suppressions arrive automatically and are never created by hand
Common Mistakes
- Uploading a list. It is stale the next day and it bypasses the thinking consent requires.
- One topic for everything. Then opting out of marketing stops results.
- Manual suppressions. See the warning above.
- Assuming WhatsApp will go out. It will not; the platform is email-first today.