News articles are a great way to keep your community informed about your consultation when they visit your web page. This could be a medium to communicate important information, highlight events and showcase projects. It is also a way to close the loop by providing feedback on the information received during a consultation. 

Note that news articles are only displayed on your site, so if you are looking to send email communications to keep your community informed then use our Newsletter tool.

To use the News feed tool, you need to add it to your EngagementHQ page. The following steps describe how to add the tool:

Select the Projects link in the navigation bar of EngagementHQ and click on your specific project. You can use the Search box to locate the required project.

Click on the title of the required project to view the project page. In this case, the project title is Sample project for EngagementHQ. In the project page, click on the Add a tool button to add the Newsfeed tool to your project.

A list of tools is displayed on a draw from the right of the screen. Click on News feed to add the News feed tool to your project. This tool is available in the Mixed environment tools tab. The News feed tool is also available in the All tab.

Now, you can view the News feed page in the selected project. To add News feed to the project, enter a suitable title in the Add a title field and click the Create button. The character limit for title text is 255. The permalink is generated automatically after you enter the title in the Title field. For example, if the title entered is Wonderful Weather, the permalink is automatically generated as /wonderful-weather, as indicated in the image below. You can edit the permalink by clicking on the Edit button.

Next, on the Edit Newsfeed page, enter a suitable description and a supporting image to your newsfeed tool. There is no character limit for the description field. The content of the newsfeed tool can be truncated as well by checking the box 'Truncate description'. To view the entire content on the project page, you can click on 'Read more'. The supporting image will appear as a thumbnail next to your feed. If the supporting image is not added, the first image added in the content is displayed as the thumbnail. Supported formats are .jpg, .jpeg, .png, and .gif. Click the Save button to save the entries.

Note : Images added in the News feed description will be visible only on the individual tool page and not in the project page view.

After entering the necessary details, click on the Save button to save the entries. The News feed tool is now available in your project’s page in the News feed section. 

Note: You can add only one newsfeed tool on a project page. Several articles can be added under a newsfeed tool.

By default, the name of the News feed tool is “News feed” and you can change it by clicking on the pencil symbol as seen in the below screenshot.

On clicking the pencil symbol button, the Name field is displayed. You can change the name of the News feed tool here and click the Save button.

 
The Edit button

If you want to change details and settings of your news feed, click the Edit button. You can also click on the title of the news feed. Here, you can view the Details and Settings tab. Each of these tabs are explained in the following sections.

                     
Details Tab

The Details tab displays the title, description and supporting image of the News feed tool. You can edit information in these fields, if required. After editing, click the Save button to save the changes.  

Note: The thumbnails for your news articles need to be 200x150 pixels. This is a 4:3 ratio, but for consistency and to make things easier we would stick to 200x150 pixels always.

Settings tab

In the Settings tab, you can change participation settings, show/hide/customize publish date, add tags to news articles, add a title link and change the permalink

Participation Settings

In this section, you can change participation settings based on how you want your participants to engage. Customize the settings of your News feed topic as explained below.

The published date for the news article can also be shown, hidden or customized under the settings section.

Categories

Add tags to categorize news articles in the News Categories widget on the project page. Keywords are used to categorize news articles so that they can be custom displayed by the News Categories widget on your EngagementHQ page. For more information regarding categories, go through the Use news categories to organise your news feed article.

Permalink
Change the permalink here, if required, by clicking on the Edit button. After this, click Save to save the settings. 

The Schedule button

To set the publish schedule, click on the Schedule button.

The following Schedule Publish window pops up on the screen. Set the date and time for the news feed to go live on the site and click on the Save button.

If you want to delete the set schedule, click on the Schedule button, the following screen is displayed. Click on the Delete button. 

Note : You can use schedule later feature to archive the newsfeed tool, however, article has be first published to use schedule later option for archiving this.

The Delete button

Click the Delete button to delete the Newsfeed tool from your project. The delete button is disabled when there are comments added to the tool.

After creating a new topic for the news feed, you can choose to publish it immediately or set a schedule. Note that only after you publish the Newsfeed tool, will it be live and visible to participants.

When your tool is ready for use, you can publish it by selecting the Publish option as shown below.

After publishing the news article, options to unpublish and archive are available. You can archive an article by clicking on the Archive option. An archived article is still visible, but a participant cannot comment. You also have the option to unpublish it by clicking on the Unpublish option in the drop-down menu. When a news article is unpublished, it is no longer visible to participants.

Preview button

Click on the Preview button to preview news articles on their standalone pages. 

The preview is displayed in a new tab, as indicated below.

To preview all news articles in one screen, click on the project preview button located at the top end of the project page , and click on the Newsfeed tab if it isn't already open.

You have successfully added and configured the News feed tool in your EngagementHQ project. You can now add subsequent news-articles via the 'Add an article' button within the Newsfeed tool tab

Contact our support team if you need any further assistance via chat or email support@engagementhq.com