Running the centre
Announcement
An announcement is the official notice a residence's management sends at once to all residents or to a group: a water cut, a change of hours, a new rule. What sets it apart from a message in a group chat is that it goes one way only and to a chosen audience.
Also known asgeneral notice · circular · broadcast · notice
How it is sent on WhatsApp
In many residences the announcement lives in three places at once: the noticeboard, email and a WhatsApp group where nobody is supposed to reply and someone always does. On WhatsApp there are several ways to do it, and they are not equivalent; the differences between a broadcast list, a group and a community are explained under their own terms. With the business platform, the same text goes out one by one, and outside the 24-hour window only as an approved message template.
Meta sorts templates into marketing, utility and authentication. To go as utility, a message cannot have promotional intent and has to be linked to a service of the person receiving it, or be essential to them, for example for their safety; a generic message without that link does not qualify as utility. On top of that, a new business portfolio can only message 250 different numbers outside the window in a rolling 24 hours, a limit set for the whole portfolio. An announcement to the whole of a large residence runs into it. How Bedel does it: announcements.
Worth knowing
What people take for granted: that sending is communicating. An announcement that arrives twice, reaches someone who has opted out, or goes to the whole building when it only affected one floor teaches people not to read the next one. Choosing who it goes to is part of the message.
Sources
Related terms
- Message templateA WhatsApp message template is a message with a fixed format and variable placeholders (a name, a time) that is registered and reviewed by Meta before use. It is the only thing that can be sent outside the 24-hour window, and each one belongs to a category: utility, marketing or authentication.
- Broadcast listA broadcast list is the WhatsApp feature that sends the same message to several contacts at once, but to each one separately: it arrives as a private chat with the sender, any reply is seen only by the sender, and nobody sees the other recipients.