Community Bulletin Board for Notices and Announcements

The bulletin board is the noticeboard your community already has, made durable. A member or a local shopkeeper submits a notice through a public form; someone on your team reads it; and once approved it appears wherever you chose to put it, the lobby screen, your public calendar, your own website, without being re-typed anywhere.

Find it at Platform > Bulletin board. Access is granted through the nonprofits.bulletin_board feature permission: view to see the board, manage to approve, reject or take a notice down, edit to change a notice’s wording or artwork.

When you’d use this

A member wants an obituary, a lost-and-found note or a class announcement on the lobby screen.
A local business wants to buy a week of screen time, and you want the money and the tax treatment recorded rather than agreed by text message.
You want the same approved notices on the lobby screen, your public calendar and your own website without re-typing any of them.
You want one person to own a review queue instead of a group chat deciding what goes up.

The three tabs

Tab	What it is for
Live board	What is on the wall right now: the landing view
Curate	The queue waiting for a decision. The tab carries a count of what is waiting.
Share	The snippet that puts the same board on your own website

How a notice gets on the wall

Someone submits it. A member of the public fills in your bulletin form, no account, no login. Your own staff can also author a notice directly.
It is screened automatically. See below. Screening sorts the queue and attaches a reason; it never approves anything.
It waits. Every notice, a stranger’s and your own, is created awaiting approval. Authoring is not approving.
A person approves it. Someone holding manage makes the call. This is the only thing that puts a notice on a wall, and only a human does it.
You place it. Approval makes a notice eligible; a placement is what actually binds it to a surface.

The states a notice moves through

State	Meaning
Draft	Being written, not submitted
Pending approval	In the Curate queue
Approved	Eligible to be placed
Rejected	Declined, with a reason the submitter can see
Cancelled	Withdrawn
Awaiting payment	Approved and invoiced; goes up the moment the invoice is paid
Expired	Past its publish window
Released, never paid	A paid slot whose run was due to start with the invoice still unpaid. The booking is cancelled, the pay link stops working, nothing is charged, and the dates go back on sale: the business is welcome to book again

Paid slots

A business or sponsor can buy screen time by the week, at one of four sizes: full screen, half screen, one-third or quarter: from the same public form: the Ad size question appears only for those two kinds, and the price shows before they send it. Community notices and event promos are free by default, and you can add free categories of your own (obituaries, prayer times) in Setup → Pricing, where the weekly prices live.

Approval is where the money happens. The approver sees the quote, can adjust the price, confirms whether the wording is an acknowledgment (name, logo, address: tax-free) or an advertisement (price, savings, endorsement: reportable as unrelated business income), and can waive the fee with a reason. Approving a priced notice sends the business an invoice with a pay link; the notice reads Awaiting payment and reaches no screen until it is paid. Pay it, and it goes up at the size they bought, and on the website widget, which is always full-width and free.

A paid ad plays only in the boxes that sell its size: a half-screen ad shows in half-screen boxes, and nowhere else. A box with no size set is a community box and carries free notices only, so paid airtime is always something you deliberately sold rather than something that spilled onto a board by accident.

If the invoice is still unpaid on the day the run was due to start, the booking is released automatically: the pay link stops working, nothing is charged, and those dates are free for someone else to buy. The business can book again whenever they like.

Automatic screening

Publicly submitted notices are screened before they reach your review queue. Screening reads the title and body, and the image when there is one, and takes the worse of the two verdicts.

Screening flags and sorts. It never approves, and it never publishes. A person remains the only thing that puts a notice on a wall.

It looks for hateful content, sexual content, violence, illegal activity, scams and adult products. It deliberately does not flag ordinary community business, a fundraising appeal that describes hardship, religious content, non-hateful political notices, or bad spelling.

If screening cannot run for any reason, the notice is marked as needing review rather than clean: it fails toward a person, never past one. And screening never blocks a submission: the notice always lands in your queue, carrying whatever screening concluded.

Alongside screening, public submissions pass a per-IP rate limit, length validation, an image size ceiling, and a malware scan.

The submission form says so. Because screening is automatic, the public form tells the person submitting that their notice is checked automatically before a person reads it, and that the check never approves or turns down a notice on its own. The processing is described in our privacy policy.

There is a daily screening ceiling per organization. It sits far above normal use, a busy board receives a handful of notices a day, and the ceiling allows hundreds, so ordinary traffic never meets it. If a day’s unusual volume does exhaust it, further notices arrive marked as needing review instead of being screened. They still arrive, and you still decide; you simply get no machine opinion attached to them until the ceiling resets.

Where a notice can go

There are exactly three surfaces, and each one has something that actually reads it:

Surface	Where it appears
Screen	A paired screen running digital signage
Public calendar	Your published calendar
Website embed	The widget on your own site: see the Share tab

A placement carries more than the surface. It says which screen or which device tag, in what order, for how long, and optionally within which part of the day.

What a notice can look like

Each notice carries a title, a body, an optional image, an optional link, an optional QR code and a footer line. Beyond that you choose a slide style, four structural ones (banner, split, stack, frame) and eight art-directed ones (editorial, poster, civic, numeral, overlay, duotone, gratitude, agenda), plus a theme.

Notices come in four types: a community notice, a business listing, a sponsor acknowledgment and an event promo. The type drives how the notice is presented and grouped, not whether it is allowed.

Image aspect guidance, poster, wide or square, is advisory. A mismatched image still renders, fitted with a margin rather than cropped.

Working the queue

From a notice in Curate you can approve it, reject it with a reason, assign it to a colleague, and leave internal notes that the submitter never sees. After a notice is live you can still take it down.

The row action Review opens that one notice on its own page, so the decision that commits money and a public surface is a page rather than a drawer inside a drawer. From there, Edit this notice opens the notice’s authoring page, where you change the wording, the image, the link, the slide style and the publish window. Editing needs the edit permission; a view-only curator sees the review page but not the edit link.

A submitter who left contact details gets a link to their own notice: they can check its status, withdraw it, or, if it was rejected, correct it and resubmit. That link is theirs alone; it grants nothing else.

Tips

Decide who owns the queue before you publish the form. A queue with no owner fills up and the board goes stale.
Reject with a reason people can act on. The submitter reads it, and a usable reason turns a rejection into a resubmission.
Use a device tag rather than a single screen when you have more than one panel: a replacement screen inherits everything the moment you tag it.
Set a publish window on anything dated. A notice past its window drops off on its own; one without a window stays until someone removes it. The console shows how long each open-ended notice has been on the board (“live 40 days, no end date”), so a stale one is easy to spot.

Common Issues

Symptom	Cause
The board is empty though notices are approved	Approved is not placed. Add a placement pointing at this surface.
A notice is on the screen but not the website	Placements are per surface: add the website one too.
Bulletin board is not in the menu	You need the `nonprofits.bulletin_board` view permission.
The queue is empty though people say they submitted	The bulletin form is not published, so it accepts nothing.
A notice is flagged that looks fine	Screening errs toward a person. Read the reason and approve it if you disagree.

What the bulletin board does not do

Paid slots are not charged at intake. A business is invoiced after a notice is approved (pay link by email), and the notice goes up once it is paid: there is no card capture on the public form by design.
There is no delivered-impressions report screen. Screens do record impressions, but reading them back is API-only for now.
Screening does not remove anything. It flags, sorts and explains; a person decides.

Digital Signage: the lobby screen
Sharing and Embedding: the board on your own site
Forms: the public submission form

Next step

Approving a notice makes it eligible; a placement is what puts it somewhere. Go to Digital Signage to pair the screen and give it a layout, then Board Layouts and Zones to decide which box on that board carries notices.

Need Help?

Contact support with the notice title and which surface you expected it on.