Allowing Topic Managers to send emails to the audiences of their topics is a great way to expand their ability to reach their users. Email can reach users that are not yet registered, sharing your content with a wider audience.

How to Open Up Connect to Topic Managers

Topic Manager access to Connect is an optional program setting. Before enabling this setting, we recommend making several decisions around exactly what Topic Manager access will look like for your program.

Your Firstup Customer Success Manager can answer questions about feature availability for your program.

When you start to establish a plan for access, you'll need to consider several items. Our team is happy to collaborate on this plan. Some sample questions to ask yourself about each communicator:

• Audience: What audience/groups will this communicator need to reach? Just the followers of their assigned topics, or everyone targeted by their topic?
• Endpoints: Does this communicator need to send emails/newsletters or just publish and promote content? If they need to send emails, which templates do they need? Which sender addresses?
• Content: What types of content will this communicator and/or person be responsible for? Would the ability to aggregate content in a newsletter benefit this Topic Manager and their audience? Should they be able to designate other Studio users as "Author"?

When you feel ready to expand Topic Manager functionality, these are the items we need:

• Confirm that you would like to enable Topic Manager access to Connect.
• Specify which email templates you would like to make available to Topic Managers.
• Confirm that you will have at least one Sender address associated with all Topic Manager topics before the expanded access is enabled. Pro-tip: edit the Default Sender to work for 'All Topics' - this will assure at least one Sender is available to all Topic Managers.
• Confirm if you would like to also expand Topic Manager access to their targeted topic audiences.
• Confirm if you would like to also expand Topic Manager access to publish as other authors.
• What is your desired timing to enable the functionality?

You should also Confirm that you have at least one Sender address associated with all Topic Manager topics before the expanded access is enabled. Pro-tip: edit the Default Sender to work for 'All Topics' - this will assure at least one Sender is available to all Topic Managers.

Permission Details

Our article on Permissions outlines exactly what Topic Managers can or cannot do in the platform, the details below dive into exactly what the permissions look like in the Connect section.

Audience Access

Topic Managers can always target the users that have subscribed (or "followed" or "joined") their assigned topics.

If enabled, your Topic Managers can also target all users targeted by their assigned topics. This opens up one additional group for every targeted topic - and the new "targeted audience" group does not appear on Groups page, only when targeting a campaign. If the Topic Manager has been assigned an untargeted topic, they can only target a campaign to subscribed users. The audience options are the same in both Smart Campaigns and Connect.

Topic Managers can see other campaigns created by other Studio users if the campaigns are targeted to audiences that the Topic Manager has access to.

Template Access

Each program must specify which templates are available to Topic Managers. Any template made available to Topic Managers is available to all Topic Managers. We recommend providing access to newsletters and custom email templates.

We can also grant access push notification templates, though we recommend leveraging Smart Campaigns instead of opening up access to push notification templates.

Sender Access

The Topic Managers access to Sender addresses in Connect works exactly like the Sender addresses for Smart Campaigns. Topic Managers are able to specify a Sender that has been associated with their assigned topics.

Note, if a Contributor does not have access to any senders, they will see a message after creating a campaign indicating that an administrator needs to grant them access. Contributors will not be able to activate any campaigns without a sender. Please make sure that all Topic Managers have access to at least one sender.

Content Access

When editing an email or push notification to link to content, Topic Managers can only choose content that is associated with their assigned topics. This aligns with how content access works in Planner.

Metric Access

Topic Managers have no access to Analyze. Topic Managers can see some high-level metrics on the Connect page, which is looking at the same data source as Analyze.

Collaboration Limits

Topic Managers can only see campaigns that are exclusively targeted to their assigned topic audience. This means that they can see campaigns created by other Studio users, but only if they are exclusively targeted to their assigned topic audience. If assigned to more than one audience, the campaign will be invisible to them.

Administrators and Program Managers can see all campaigns created by Topic Managers.

Topic Manager Support

Newly promoted Topic Managers can start with our Getting Started guide.

Topic Managers that only need details on how to create emails through Connect can refer to our Create an Email Campaign article.