Cover stories are designed to feature and highlight important initiatives and create engagement. They appear on the user Dashboard as a large banner-style photo with customizable text and a link to any URL specified by the program administrator.
Permissions
Users with the dashboard manager role can create cover stories.
Creating a cover story
To create a cover story:
- Select Manage from the top right corner of your screen.
- Go to Content > Create Cover Stories.
There are three steps involved in creating and publishing a new cover story.
Step 1: Customize
As you complete step 1, the preview section at the top updates to display the customizations.
Select an image
By default, the cover story populates with your site’s brand or theme color as the background. If you’d like to add an image, you can upload one here. Learn more about Adding cover story images.
Edit text
Add your call to action. Here you can add a title text and an optional subtitle. If you’d like to publish an image only without any text, select the checkbox I do not want to add any text.
The I do not want to add any text checkbox is available if an image is selected. If you did not select an image and choose to use your theme colors, adding a Text Title is mandatory.
Select a button
There are three text options for your call-to-action button. Choose one and enter any URL you’d like to take your users to. The full URL including ‘ https:// ‘ must be included.
Select Next: Feature to move to the next step.
Step 2: Feature
On page two of the cover story form, you can schedule and target your cover story.
When would you like to feature this cover story?
Select start and end dates/times. The Start date and time defaults to the day you begin the form and the time zone in your profile settings. The time format uses the 24-hour clock, so there is no need to add AM/PM. Consider the time zone when targeting specific user groups.
You can choose to run a cover story indefinitely by selecting the Keep this cover story featured until I decide to set an End Date/Time checkbox.
Which users would you like to see this cover story?
Next, choose one or more groups of users who will see this cover story on their dashboard by selecting the relevant options for at least one of the demographic data fields shown.
- Hold down the Control key (⌘ on Mac) to select multiple options.
- If no options are selected, all users will see the cover story.
- If the options selected make a user eligible to see multiple cover stories, they will see the one that was activated most recently, based on the start date.
Tip!
Adding multiple groups increases the number of users who are eligible to see the cover story. In other words, the groups are combined using logic.
For example: If there are two groups selected, one for User Country = Canada and one for Preferred Language = French, the cover story appears for all Canadian users and all users with French language preferences, i.e., any users outside of Canada with their preferred language set to French, and any English-speaking user, with their country set to Canada would see it too.
Select Next: Review to continue.
Step 3: Review
The review page summarizes the date and time that your story will be featured and which user groups will see it. If everything looks right, go ahead and Publish your cover story!