Comms Hub App Overview
Plan, draft, route, deliver, and measure every internal communication from one place — instead of stitching together a newsletter tool, a broadcast surface, trigger plumbing, an audience spreadsheet, and an analytics dashboard.
What is Comms Hub?
Comms Hub is the internal-communications operating layer for MangoApps Workforce. It is a platform-tier marketplace app that unifies every comms surface — newsletters, campaigns, event-driven triggers, ideas, and the annual plan — on one calendar, one composer, and one shared set of audiences. Broadcast, News Feed, Surveys, and Recognitions remain their own apps (the “engines”); Comms Hub is the layer that plans, targets, routes, and measures across all of them.
Core Value Proposition:
- 📅 One calendar, not five tools — newsletter issues, campaign touches, triggered emails, and plan slots all appear on a single timeline, instead of one point-tool per channel.
- 🤖 AI that sounds like your company — the AI Writer drafts from a one-line goal and applies tenant-scoped Brand Voices trained on copy you already publish.
- 🎯 Audiences as a shared primitive — the same target definition powers a newsletter, a campaign, and a triggered email; no rebuilding lists per channel.
- 🔗 Native to your workforce data — dynamic newsletter blocks pull live recognitions, new hires, open shifts, and course completions; triggers fire on HR-lifecycle events — because MangoApps owns both sides.
Key Concepts (How It Works)
If you only read one section, read this — it explains the model behind the screens.
Comms Hub introduces a few primitives that behave differently from one another. The distinctions below are the ones users most often get wrong.
Comms Hub is the operating layer; Broadcast / News Feed / Surveys / Recognitions are the engines
Comms Hub does not replace Broadcast, News Feed, Surveys, or Recognitions — it orchestrates them. Those apps are the delivery engines; Comms Hub sits above them and adds the shared workflow every comms team needs: a calendar, reusable audiences, multi-touch campaigns, approval routing, and analytics.
The Compose picker (/apps/comms-hub/compose) is the single “what do you want to send?” entry point. Each tile routes to the right engine under the hood — a Broadcast (formal, acknowledgment-tracked), a Must-Read or general News Feed post, a Survey, an Emergency alert, a Newsletter issue, a Campaign, or a Triggered comm. So an author picks the job (“recurring digest,” “please-read policy,” “collect input”) and Comms Hub opens the correct tool. Broadcast is still available as its own marketplace tile for teams who only want that one surface.
What a CommsItem is — the glue that puts everything on one calendar
A CommsItem is a lightweight, polymorphic pointer. Whenever a Broadcast, a News Feed post, a Survey, a Recognition, or a Newsletter Issue is created through the comms fabric, a CommsItem row references it (source_type / source_id) so it shows up on the Comms Calendar with a status (draft / scheduled / published / canceled), a scheduled time, an owner, an audience, and an optional campaign. The CommsItem is the reason a survey built in the Surveys app and a newsletter built in Comms Hub can appear side-by-side on the same timeline.
Publication vs Issue — the newsletter and its drops
These two are easy to confuse:
- A Publication is the newsletter itself — a recurring (or ad-hoc) parent that owns a name, a URL slug, a default audience, a reusable default block template, and channel toggles (email / in-app / public archive). Example: “The Frontline Weekly.”
- An Issue is one dated drop of that Publication — “Frontline Weekly, March 14.” Issues hold the actual content Blocks and walk their own lifecycle.
One Publication has many Issues. You configure the Publication once; you author an Issue each cycle.
Static blocks vs dynamic blocks — and what “frozen at send” means
Newsletter Issues are built from Blocks in a drag-and-drop composer:
- Static blocks render the content you typed:
text,herobanner,callout,button,image,divider. - Dynamic blocks pull live workforce data at render time — this week’s recognitions, new hires & anniversaries, top news posts, course completions, open shifts, pulse-survey results, recently published sites, upcoming events. Each dynamic block only works when its source app is enabled for the tenant (e.g. the “Open shifts” block requires Shifts Scheduling).
When an Issue moves to scheduled or sent, every block is frozen — its resolved content is snapshotted into an immutable payload. This is the key guarantee: if a recognition is deleted or a new hire’s record changes after the issue goes out, the archived issue still shows exactly what subscribers received. Dynamic ≠ mutable-forever; dynamic means “resolved fresh, then locked at send.”
Audiences: composition vs definition (two shapes, one member list)
An Audience is the shared targeting primitive reused by newsletters, campaigns, and triggers. It persists in one of two shapes, and both resolve to the same thing — a list of users:
- Composition (preferred) — references existing platform recipient groups and combines them with set operations:
wrap(one group as-is),and(intersection),or(union), plus an optionalrefinementthat filters the result by role. The AI Audience Builder emits these from a natural-language description. - Definition (legacy) — a self-contained rule:
all,departments,locations,roles,users,on_shift_at_location, orwithin_radius.
The point of a shared Audience is that “all frontline managers in California” is defined once and reused everywhere, instead of rebuilt per newsletter. Member counts are cached and refreshed whenever the definition changes.
Idea Bank vs Annual Plan — tactical vs strategic
Both answer “what should we say,” at different horizons:
- The Annual Plan is the strategic 12-month editorial calendar, built from preset bundles (US Core HR, Safety, Engagement, etc.). It’s a quarterly-use surface.
- The Idea Bank is the tactical ~30-day capture of topics you want to communicate soon. Ideas carry a status (
open/promoted/parked/discarded) and a source (manualorai_suggested).
They connect: an Annual Plan slot promotes into an Idea, and an Idea promotes into a Campaign (multi-touch) or a CommsItem (single comm). The AI Planning Assistant proposes fresh Ideas grounded in your recent comms, holidays, and in-flight campaigns.
Campaign vs Trigger vs Publication — three ways to “send more than once”
- A Publication sends on a cadence (a weekly digest).
- A Campaign is a multi-touch wrapper bundling several different comms under one initiative with a shared theme and KPI targets — e.g. Open Enrollment 2026 = a kickoff Broadcast + four newsletter Issues + a mid-window reminder + a close-out Survey.
- A Trigger is event-driven automation: it fires a templated comm automatically when a platform event happens (an onboarding milestone, a recognition received, a policy update). Triggers have per-recipient throttle, quiet hours, and blackout-period respect built in.
What determines who can do what
Authorization has three independent layers — don’t conflate them:
- App access (who sees Comms Hub at all) is governed solely by the platform Access Management capability. Any employee with access can author their own drafts.
- App admin (who configures the app) is the platform App Administrators capability, plus any extra roles an admin names in Additional App Admin Roles. Admins enable modules, manage everyone’s records, and open Settings & Analytics.
- Who can publish/send is a separately configurable capability. By default only admins/app-admins can send; a tenant can widen this to a “Communicators” group without granting full admin. Editing or deleting someone else’s record always requires being that record’s owner or an admin.
At a Glance
| 📅 Calendar Surfaces | 📰 Newsletters | 🤖 AI Tools | 🎯 Audiences | 📊 Analytics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual Plan + daily Calendar | Publications + Issues | Writer · Brand Voices · Grader · Audience Builder · Podcasts | Composition over recipient groups | Opens · clicks · archive views |
Perfect For:
- 🏢 Internal communications leads running 1–10-person comms teams who need plan → draft → route → send → measure in one product
- 👥 HR & People teams who own onboarding, benefits, policy, and lifecycle comms and want them triggered off real HR events
- 📣 People leaders broadcasting organizational change to targeted, reusable audiences
How It Works
The Comms Hub layering model
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ COMMS HUB — operating layer │
│ Calendar · Compose · Audiences · Campaigns · Approvals · Analytics │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Compose picker routes each "job" to the right engine ▼ │
│ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌────────────┐ ┌─────────┐ │
│ │ Broadcast │ │ News Feed │ │ Surveys │ │Recognitions│ │Newsletter│ │
│ │ (ack) │ │(must-read)│ │ (input) │ │ (thanks) │ │ (native) │ │
│ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └────────────┘ └─────────┘ │
│ └────────── all surface as CommsItems on ONE Calendar ─────────┘ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Newsletter Issue lifecycle
┌────────┐ submit ┌───────────┐ approve/schedule ┌───────────┐ send ┌────────┐
│ DRAFT │ ──────────▶ │ IN_REVIEW │ ───────────────────▶ │ SCHEDULED │ ───────▶ │ SENT │
└────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └────┬───┘
▲ │ reject │ │ blocks FROZEN
│ revise ▼ blocks FROZEN at schedule ▼
└────────────────── REJECTED ARCHIVED
From idea to sent comm
ANNUAL PLAN slot ──promote──▶ IDEA ──promote──▶ CAMPAIGN ──contains──▶ CommsItems
(12-month strategy) (Idea Bank, (multi-touch) on the Calendar
~30-day) └──promote──▶ CommsItem (single comm)
Key Features
📅 Unified Calendar & Planning
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Comms Calendar | Every scheduled comm — newsletter issues, campaign touches, triggered emails, and plan slots — on one timeline, with holiday and blackout-period overlays. |
| Annual Plan | A 12-month strategic editorial calendar from preset bundles; slots promote into draftable Ideas. |
| Idea Bank | Capture comm topics before committing to a date; promote to a Campaign or single CommsItem. |
| AI Planning Assistant | Suggests fresh ideas grounded in your recent comms, holidays, and in-flight campaigns. |
Use Case: A comms lead seeds the year in the Annual Plan from the “US Core HR” bundle, evolves this month’s slots into Ideas, and drafts each one when it comes due — all without leaving the app.
💡 Pro Tip: Load Settings → Load Sample Data on day one so the Calendar, Publications, and Idea Bank aren’t empty while you learn the tabs — then delete it before you go live.
📰 Newsletters (Publications & Issues)
A Publication is the newsletter parent (name, slug, default audience, default block template, channel toggles). Each Publication owns a stream of Issues built in a block-based composer.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Block composer | Drag-and-drop static blocks (text, hero, callout, button, image, divider) and dynamic blocks. |
| Dynamic blocks | Live recognitions, new hires & anniversaries, top news posts, course completions, open shifts, pulse results, recent sites, upcoming events. |
| Frozen at send | Blocks snapshot at schedule/send so the archive never changes after delivery. |
| Public archive | Opt in per-Publication for a permanent shareable URL at /pub/<publication-slug>/<issue-slug>. |
| AI whole-issue draft | Generate an entire issue’s blocks from a one-line goal; AI block rewrite revises a single block. |
| AI hero images | Generate an on-brand banner image for a hero block. |
| AI podcast edition | Turn a sent issue into a two-host audio episode saved to your media library. |
Use Case: A weekly frontline digest defined once as a Publication, with dynamic “open shifts” and “recognitions” blocks, delivers itself every Monday to the “all managers + above” audience.
💡 Pro Tip: Put dynamic blocks (recognitions, new hires) in the Publication’s default template so every new Issue starts pre-populated — you only hand-write the intro.
🤖 AI Writer & Brand Voices
The AI Writer (/apps/comms-hub/writer) generates, rewrites, and transforms comms copy. Brand Voices are tenant-scoped writing profiles trained on 3–10 samples of copy you already publish, so output sounds like your organization, not a generic model.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Generate / Rewrite / Transform | Draft from a goal, rewrite a passage, or change tone/format. |
| Brand Voice training | Add samples → click Analyze → the profile flips to ready with extracted style characteristics the Writer applies. |
| In-composer helpers | AI whole-issue draft and single-block rewrite are the Writer wired into the newsletter composer. |
💡 Pro Tip: Train a Brand Voice from your best-performing past newsletters before drafting — the Writer then matches your house style on the first pass.
✅ Comms Effectiveness Grader
Paste a draft (or a document) and the Grader (/apps/comms-hub/grader) scores it before you send — surfacing readability, sentiment, tone, PII exposure, inclusivity/bias, and channel fit so you catch what employees will misread ahead of time. Reports are tenant-scoped and don’t expire.
🎯 Audiences
The shared targeting primitive across newsletters, campaigns, and triggers.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Composition | wrap / and / or over existing recipient groups, plus optional role refinement. |
| Definition (legacy) | Self-contained rules: all, departments, locations, roles, users, on-shift-at-location, within-radius. |
| AI Audience Builder | Natural language (“everyone in engineering in California”) → a composition preview to review and save. |
| Cached counts | Member counts refresh automatically when a definition changes. |
📣 Campaigns & Approvals
Campaigns wrap multiple CommsItems under one multi-touch initiative with a theme, KPI targets, kickoff, and end date. Approval Workflows route drafts through ordered reviewer steps (each step names an approver role) before anything publishes; reviewers approve or reject from the queue at /apps/comms-hub/approvals. A rejected item can be revised back to draft.
💡 Pro Tip: Scope an approval workflow to a specific surface (e.g. Broadcasts or Emergency alerts) so routine newsletter issues aren’t slowed by a review gate they don’t need.
⚡ Triggers
Event-driven comms that fire automatically on platform events. Registered categories include onboarding (day 1, week 1, day 30/60/90), lifecycle (birthday, work anniversary, new-hire announcement), recognition (recognition received), and policy (policy updated).
| Control | Description |
|---|---|
| Channels | Email and/or in-app, per trigger. |
| Throttle | Minimum minutes between firings to the same recipient. |
| Quiet hours | Time window (business timezone) during which firings are suppressed — supports windows crossing midnight. |
| Blackout respect | Skip firings during platform-wide PTO blackout periods. |
| Firing history | Per-recipient firing log for observability. |
📊 Analytics & Tracking
Per-issue analytics live at each Issue’s Analytics view; an app-wide roll-up is at /apps/comms-hub/analytics (admin-only).
- Opens — tracked via a signed 1×1 pixel; recipient identity is signed so opens can’t be forged.
- Clicks — tracked through a signed redirect, grouped into top-clicked URLs.
- Anonymous archive opens — public-archive views feed analytics without user attribution.
- CSV export — download the numbers from the dashboard.
🔔 Notifications
| Type | When triggered |
|---|---|
| Approval requested | An item enters a workflow and an approver has a pending review. |
| Published | A comm goes out to its recipients. |
| Issue email | A newsletter Issue is delivered to a subscriber. |
| Test issue email | An author sends themselves a test before the real send. |
| Trigger email | An event-driven trigger fires an email to a recipient. |
🤖 AI Agent (Ask AI)
Comms Hub ships an Ask AI agent that answers questions about your comms and takes a limited, confirmed action:
- List upcoming comms across all source apps within a day window (“what’s scheduled this week?”).
- Search comms content — newsletter issues, publications, and open ideas by topic (semantic search).
- Schedule a draft CommsItem — a write action, gated behind an explicit confirmation prompt.
- Answer how-to questions by retrieving Comms Hub help articles (this article grounds those answers).
The agent never invents items or dates, and drafting copy is deliberately handed off to the Compose surface rather than done by the agent.
User Roles & Permissions
| Role | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Employee (with app access) | Read newsletters and the in-app inbox, browse the public archive, use the AI Writer and Grader (if enabled), author their own drafts and ideas, submit for review. Cannot publish/send unless placed in the publisher group; cannot edit others’ records. |
| Manager / Reviewer | Everything an employee can do, plus act as an approval-workflow step (approve/reject items routed to their role). If included in the Who can publish group, can send. |
| HR / App Admin / Admin | Full control — enable/disable modules, manage all Publications, Issues, Campaigns, Audiences, Triggers, and Approval Workflows, publish/send, configure Settings, and view Analytics. App-admin can be delegated without granting global admin. |
Module toggles (admin-configurable per business): Calendar, Compose Picker, Idea Bank + AI Planning Assistant, AI Writer, Brand Voices, Annual Plan, Comms Grader, Publications, Campaigns, Audiences, Approval Workflows, Triggers, Analytics, Ask AI Agent, LinkedIn cross-post, and approver notifications. On-by-default: Calendar, Compose, Ideas, AI Writer, Brand Voices, Annual Plan, Grader, Audiences, Agent. Off-by-default (admin must enable): Publications, Campaigns, Approval Workflows, Triggers, Analytics, LinkedIn cross-post.
How We Compare
See how MangoApps Workforce Comms Hub stacks up against leading internal-comms tools:
| Feature | MangoApps Comms Hub | Staffbase | Poppulo | ContactMonkey |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI-drafted newsletters + block composer | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Open + click analytics | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| AI Writer trained on your sample copy (brand voice) | ✅ | ⚡ | ⚡ | ⚡ |
| Native event-triggered comms (onboarding, recognition, policy) | ✅ | ⚡ | ⚡ | ⚡ |
| Dynamic blocks from live workforce data (shifts, recognitions, courses) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Approval workflows with reviewer queue | ✅ | ⚡ | ⚡ | ✅ |
| Included in one per-employee workforce platform (shifts, recognition, training, surveys) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Legend: ✅ Included | ❌ Not Available | 💰 Paid Add-on | ⚡ Limited/Varies |
Why MangoApps Workforce?
- 🔗 Unified Platform — Comms Hub sits on the same platform as Shifts, Recognitions, Training, and Surveys, so audiences and dynamic content come from real workforce data — no integration build.
- ⚡ Triggers fire on native events — recognition-received and onboarding-milestone comms are bidirectional and native, not webhook-wired.
- 💰 One per-employee license — the calendar, composer, audiences, and analytics aren’t separate seat licenses.
Competitor capabilities verified via public product pages (July 2026): Staffbase Email, Poppulo Internal Email, ContactMonkey Features. Marks reflect publicly documented features and may change.
Getting Started
For Administrators
- Open the Apps Marketplace, find Comms Hub, and click Enable (it’s license-required and disabled by default).
- Open Settings (
/apps/comms-hub/settings) and turn on the off-by-default modules you need — typically Publications first, then Campaigns / Approvals / Triggers / Analytics as you grow. - Optionally load Sample Data so the tabs aren’t empty while your team learns the product.
- Decide who can publish/send — keep it admins-only, or widen it to a Communicators group.
For Comms Leads / HR
- Build your first Audience (
/apps/comms-hub/audiences/new) — or describe it to the AI Audience Builder. - Create a Publication (
/apps/comms-hub/publications/new), set its default template and audience, then add an Issue. - Train a Brand Voice (
/apps/comms-hub/brand_voices/new) so the AI Writer matches your house style. - Plan ahead in the Annual Plan and capture day-to-day topics in the Idea Bank.
For Employees
- Read newsletters in your inbox or on the public archive link.
- If your admin enabled it, use the AI Writer and Grader to draft and pressure-test your own comms.
Best Practices
- ✅ Define audiences once, reuse everywhere — a shared Audience keeps a newsletter, a campaign, and a trigger targeting the same people without drift.
- ✅ Freeze-friendly newsletters — trust that scheduled/sent issues are immutable; never “fix” a dynamic block after send expecting the archive to update.
- ✅ Grade before you send — run high-stakes comms (policy changes, RIFs, benefits) through the Grader to catch bias, PII, and misreads.
- ✅ Scope approvals to what matters — gate Broadcasts and Emergency alerts, not routine digests, so review doesn’t become a bottleneck.
- ✅ Let triggers carry the lifecycle — onboarding, birthday, anniversary, and recognition comms should be automated with quiet hours and throttles, not sent by hand.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do I have to move off Broadcast, News Feed, and Surveys to use Comms Hub?
A: No. Those apps remain your delivery engines. Comms Hub’s Compose picker routes to them and adds the shared calendar, audiences, campaigns, approvals, and analytics on top. Broadcast is still available as its own tile for teams who only need that surface.
Q: What’s the difference between a Campaign, a Publication, and a Trigger?
A: A Publication is a recurring newsletter (sends on a cadence). A Campaign bundles several different comms — a Broadcast, newsletter issues, a reminder, a survey — under one multi-touch initiative. A Trigger fires a single templated comm automatically when a platform event happens (an onboarding milestone, a recognition received).
Q: If a dynamic block shows “this week’s recognitions,” will the archived issue change later?
A: No. Dynamic blocks resolve fresh, but every block is frozen when the issue is scheduled or sent. The archive permanently shows what subscribers received, even if the underlying data changes afterward.
Q: Who can send communications?
A: By default, only admins and Comms Hub app-admins. Any employee with app access can author their own drafts, but publishing/sending is a separately configurable capability — a tenant can widen it to a “Communicators” group without granting full admin.
Q: Does the AI Writer sound generic?
A: Only if you skip Brand Voices. Train a Brand Voice on 3–10 samples of copy you already publish, and the Writer applies your organization’s tone instead of a default model voice.
Related Resources
- Broadcast App Overview — the acknowledgment-tracked critical-comms engine Comms Hub routes to.
- News Feed App Overview — must-read and general posts from the Compose picker.
- Surveys App Overview — collect input as a comm; pulse results feed dynamic blocks.
- Recognition App Overview — recognitions feed dynamic blocks and fire triggers.
- Comms Planner Overview — the free, public planning tool for scoping a year of comms before licensing Comms Hub.
Comms Hub — plan the year, draft in your voice, target once, and prove it landed. One operating layer for every internal communication.