CANNONBALL FIRING AND FLUSHING
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In this video we will go over the process of firing (sending) a campaign in cannonball. We will also cover the process of flushing which controls the way recipients flow through a campaign.
Transcript
To do this we’ll add some recipients to the Input Node, and then fire the campaign. It is not critical that we do these in that order, as you can easily add more recipients after a campaign has been fired.
Select the Input node, and drag our group of recipients from the groups panel, up onto the list of recipients. We’ll add both a small group of test recipients, and a larger group for our final recipients.
Now test fire the campaign. This will allow all of the recipients from that test group to become active in this campaign, and to be able to flow between nodes.
This brings up the important point of flushing, and buffers. You will notice that upon firing, our Input Node got this little number appear. This is the number of recipients that are currently waiting on the input node, ready to flow to other nodes. If we click this number we can see them waiting in the input node’s queue. From this queue they can be flushed, which will give them permission to continue from this node, down the campaign tree. This requirement for flushing allows you both to preview exactly who will receive a communication, and also to automate when recipients are permitted to flow further. By default all nodes need to be flushed manually, but this can be changed to immediately, or at a particular time or recurring schedule.
For now, we’ll flush all of these recipients from the Input Node. Now we can see these recipients are no longer waiting on the input, and have travelled down the campaign tree, through the condition and splitter nodes, and are waiting at the various output nodes. We can go in and adjust these conditions - such as changing the “city” to “Brisbane”, and see the change occur downstream immediately. Similarly we can change the splitter percentages, and see this reflected below.
Finally we can even add additional nodes to this live campaign. Here we will add a new Input Node with a couple of particular individuals - perhaps people who have responded via telephone, and hook that into our final content. We can now flush these two new recipients from this input, bypassing our other conditions and splitter.
