Setting up a digest — Gorilla Dash

Use Create New Digest. Everything below can be changed later, so get it roughly right and refine it after the first send.

The basics

A Digest Name, which is also the email subject line, a Digest Heading shown at the top, a Footer Message for any legal or privacy wording, and a Digest Logo — leave the logo blank and your organisation logo is used.

THE NAME IS THE SUBJECT LINE

It arrives in inboxes exactly as written, every time. "Weekly Digest" is a subject people stop opening; something that names your network reads better.

Schedule

Choose a Frequency — Daily, Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly or Manual — then a Day and a Time in half-hour steps. Daily does not ask for a day. Times are worked out in your organisation's timezone.

THE SEND NOW BUTTON ONLY EXISTS ON MANUAL DIGESTS

If your digest is set to Weekly and you want a one-off extra send, there is no button for it. Either switch the frequency to Manual, send, and switch it back — or plan around it.

Two switches control whether it goes at all: Send weekly digest and Skip if no articles. The second only checks for articles — with it off, a digest containing nothing but reviews still sends.

Where it comes from

Under Sender Domain, send from the Gorilla Dash domain or from your own. Choosing your own asks for a Sender Address and only appears if you have a verified sending domain set up.

The automatic content

Setting	Controls
Include tribe our work posts	Whether case studies are pulled in at all.
Only include approved our work posts	Whether they need signing off first.
Maximum number and maximum age	How many, and how recent.
Include positive reviews	Pulls in featured reviews above four stars.
Include review leader board	Ranks tribes by review score.

Turning on approval adds a Work Post Approval screen where you preview each post and approve or reject it. Worth it if your tribes publish unevenly.

How Our Work posts are chosen

When there are more eligible posts than the Maximum number allows, the digest shares the places out between tribes rather than picking at random. Publishing on a particular day of the week or at a particular time does not move a post up the queue. Each digest fills its places in this order:

Posts marked Feature in next digest, oldest first.
One post from each tribe, starting with tribes that have never appeared in a digest, then the tribe whose posts appeared longest ago. Posts made at organisation level take a turn together, as if they were one tribe.
If places are left, a second post from each tribe in the same order, and so on.

Within a tribe, the oldest eligible post goes first, so it is used before it passes the maximum age. A post appears in only one digest, and posts from inactive tribes are never included.

FEATURING A POST

To make sure a particular post goes out, open Work Post Approval, select the post and click Feature in next digest. A star appears beside it in the list. A featured post is included even if it is older than the maximum age, but it still has to be published, have Include weekly digest ticked, belong to an active tribe if it belongs to one, and be approved if approval is switched on. The star is removed once the post has been sent; click the button again to remove it sooner.

Changing the day resets the cadence

Editing the day or time clears the record of when it last sent, which matters for a fortnightly digest — it will restart its two-week count from the next send rather than continuing the old rhythm.