Instructure Community Email Digests

We’ve heard from the Community, and we’re excited to introduce an email digest designed to bring trending conversations, new discussions, and recent updates from the categories you follow, all in one place.

Being informed in the Community starts with following content that matters to you. The more categories you follow or groups you join, the more relevant your digest will be, helping you stay connected, discover new ideas, and make the most of your Community experience.

For tips on following content and making sure you don’t miss important updates, check out our blog Stay in the Loop by Following What Matters Most.
To learn more about the digest and your settings, read our guide: What is the email digest in the Instructure Community?

A few things to know about the Community digest

This is an opt-in experience. You choose whether you want to receive it.
By default, your digest will arrive on Thursdays, but you can choose to receive it daily, weekly, or monthly.
Your digest is not a full replacement for notifications. You’ll still want to check your notifications in the Instructure Community for real-time updates.
Your digest is designed as a springboard. It features important and relevant content based on what you follow, helping you stay on top of key updates without feeling overwhelmed.

We want this digest to work for you, so we’re inviting your feedback. After you receive an email or two, what’s working well? What could be better? Your input will help shape this digest email into a tool that’s truly useful for everyone.

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Community Updates

Comments

dbrace

Thank you so much, @Kristin Lundstrum and others in the Community Team!

After a few days/weeks of receiving it, I will make sure to come back here and provide feedback.

-Doug

BethCrook

Thank you, @Kristin Lundstrum! I'm excited to start getting this.

leward

@Kristin Lundstrum . I am not finding the digest to be particularly useful. Users typically opt in to digests when they want all of the posts for their subscriptions to be consolidated into a single message (as was the case in the old community platform). Since moving to the new platform, I receive far too many individual messages from the community and I don't necessarily want to open and read all of them. In days of old, I was able to scan the digest and read only the posts that interested me.

Also, it's not at all obvious how the new digest feature decides what to include in the digest. For me, it will only be helpful if it includes everything I would have received as individual messages. Then, as a bonus, I'd like not to receive those individual messages. But if the second part isn't possible, I can set up inbox rules to delete them and keep only the digest. Please consider implementing a true digest feature instead of using an algorithm to decide what to include in the digest.

SarahBlanton

@Kristin Lundstrum I agree with @leward 100%. While I appreciate the willingness to try to implement this, the digests I've received so far have each contained a single post, the second one that I received being so non-useful that I see it's been taken down now. A digest should be single email that summarizes multiple posts, comments, and other subscribed Community content from a given time period. It should help reduce inbox clutter and overwhelm by combining frequent alerts into a single, organized overview. I used to be able to skim the digests to keep up to date and then dive in further as needed. I'd be grateful to have that feature back.

Kristin Lundstrum

Hi @leward and @SarahBlanton, thank you for the candid feedback. Unfortunately, the 'full consolidated list' format isn't a native capability of this new platform, so we don't have a simple switch to turn it back on.

I agree that a digest containing only a single post doesn't provide much added value. It’s possible that your settings need some fine-tuning to ensure the digest is capturing everything you’re interested in! Our team will update our Community guide to make this clearer, but in the meantime, follow more categories and ensure they are checked for inclusion in your email digest.

@leward, I’m right there with you on the inbox rules! I use those same automations to keep my own notifications organized. It’s a helpful 'pro-tip' for members who need to rely on Community notifications but want to keep their primary inbox clear. I will also be surfacing this feedback about a "true digest" functionality with our team at Higher Logic Vanilla so they understand the need for a more consolidated format.