Configuring the daily digest

The daily digest is the email that lands in every staff member’s inbox each morning summarising today’s notices. It catches the staff who don’t log into PortalHQ first thing — and it’s a forcing function for everyone to read the morning’s announcements.

Where to configure

Go to Notices → Daily digest in your portal admin settings.

Fields

• Enabled — turn the digest on or off.
• Send time — when the digest goes out. Typically 6 am or 7 am.
• Send days — which days of the week to send. Weekdays only is common; some schools include weekend digests for weekend events.
• Include weekends — separate flag for weekend digests.
• Only during term dates — when ticked, digests pause during school holidays.
• Days to include — which days of notices to include in each digest:
• Today only — the most common.
• Today and tomorrow — useful for evening planning.
• Today and next 7 days — useful for week-ahead overviews.

Per-member personalisation

The digest is personalised — each recipient gets the notices targeted at their groups, not a one-size-fits-all version.

So:

• The maths teacher gets maths notices and whole-school notices.
• The PE teacher gets PE notices and whole-school notices.
• Office staff get whole-school notices.

This means the digest length varies by recipient. A staff member with many group memberships gets a longer digest than someone with few.

Send days

Add Send Day records to specify which days of the week the digest fires. A common configuration:

You can stagger send times by day if needed (e.g. earlier send on Friday so staff see fixtures for Saturday).

Exclusion dates

For specific days when you don’t want a digest (public holidays, pupil-free days, school holidays):

1. Add an Exclusion date for each day to skip.
2. The digest skips automatically on those dates.

For longer periods (e.g. full school holidays), it’s easier to disable the digest globally and re-enable when term starts. The Only during term dates flag handles this automatically if your term dates are configured.

Preview the digest

Before going live with the digest:

1. Choose Preview daily digest.
2. Pick a sample staff member.
3. PortalHQ renders what that person’s digest would look like for today.

Use this to confirm:

• The right notices are appearing.
• The targeting is working as expected.
• The email layout looks correct.

Duplicate prevention

Each notice is sent to a given member at most once. If a notice runs Monday to Friday and the staff member gets Monday’s digest, the notice doesn’t re-appear in Tuesday’s digest. This stops the digest becoming repetitive for long-running notices.

Logging

Every digest send is logged. Check Notices → Digest log for:

• Send timestamps.
• Number of recipients.
• Failures (bounced emails, missing addresses).

If a staff member says they didn’t get the digest, this is the first place to look.

Tips

• Don’t send too early. A 5 am send is technically fine but seems creepy to recipients. 6:30-7:30 am is the sweet spot.
• Don’t send too late. A 9 am send is after most staff are already at their desks — the digest is no longer the morning briefing.
• Pause during holidays. Use the exclusion dates or term-only flag — sending a digest with no notices during holidays trains staff to ignore it.
• Test changes carefully. Use the preview, then send a real digest to yourself only, before pushing changes to the whole staff.