How Promo Engine works
Everything here takes about fifteen minutes to read, and you can stop after “Your first campaign” and still get most of the value.
The whole idea
Every time something needs promoting, a church makes the same decisions over again. When do we announce it? How many posts? Does it go in the newsletter, or is it just a Sunday thing? Who's making the graphic?
Promo Engine asks you for one of those decisions and works out the rest. You say how big something is. It writes the schedule.
Levels
A level answers one question: how much of the church does this actually affect? Your church starts with three, plus one for things that are always available.
- Level 1 — affects nearly everyone. A weekend away, a Christmas service. Six weeks of promotion across every channel.
- Level 2 — a group you can name in a sentence. A parents' evening, a men's breakfast. Four weeks.
- Level 3 — a smaller group. Volunteer training, a team meeting. Two weeks, and it interrupts nobody it doesn't concern.
- Constant — always available. Giving, getting connected. Loops monthly rather than counting down to anything.
Setting up
When you sign up you're walked through five short screens. Only one of them really matters, and it's the channels.
Channels
A channel is anywhere your church actually communicates. You start with four. Delete anything you don't use — a church that keeps “Website” without having one will be handed work for it every single time.
Each channel has a kind, which is how the engine reasons about it without knowing the name. An email has a build day. Something said out loud happens in a room. Production is the odd one — work that has to exist before anything else can go out, like a graphic or a video. It reaches nobody directly, which is exactly why it gets forgotten.
Your first campaign
- Click + Add on Up next, or + New campaign on Campaigns.
- Give it a name and the date it happens.
- Pick a level. The button tells you how many items it'll produce.
- Put anything useful in the details — links, times, the ask. That rides along on every item, so whoever's making a post has what they need.
- Click Build the schedule.
That's it. Open the campaign and you'll see the run drawn out — each mark one piece of work, each column a week, coloured by channel.
Ready by, goes out
This is the one idea worth understanding properly, because everything else depends on it.
Every item has two dates. Goes out is when people see it. Ready by is when the work has to exist. The gap between them is called the lead time, and it's set per rule.
A story email needs someone asked, a reply, and an edit — that's a week and a half. A reminder text is written the day before. Setting those honestly is what stops somebody finding out on Sunday morning that something was needed on Wednesday.
Every list in Promo Engine sorts by the ready-by date, not the publish date. That's deliberate. Nobody needs a reminder on the day it's due to go out.
Handing work out
Hover any item and an avatar appears on the right. Click it, pick a person, done. They get an email straight away with what it is, when it's due, and a link to their list.
For a whole campaign at once, open it and use Assign in bulk — pick a channel and a person, and every item on that channel goes across. That's one email, not eight.
The brief
Open an item and you can write a brief: what it is, plus links to anything they need — the brand folder, last year's graphic, the sign-up page. Whoever's doing the work sees that as read-only, and hands back their own notes and links underneath when they're finished.
Keeping track
Mine is your own list. Up next is everyone's.
On Up next, three controls do most of the work:
- Show → Overdue — anything past its ready-by date that isn't done. The first thing to check on a Monday.
- Group by → Person — who's carrying what, with overdue counts in red. Unassigned comes first, because that's the pile needing a decision.
- Range — this week, next week, next three months.
One-off posts
Not everything deserves a campaign. + Add → Single item gives you one post or one send, with a channel, a date and a person, in about ten seconds. It behaves like anything else — it's on their list, in their calendar, and in their inbox.
Adding people
Click your church name in the header, then Church. Enter a name, what they do, and an email, and send. They get an invitation, choose their own password, and land straight in your church. You never hand out a temporary one.
There are two roles:
- Staff see their own work and can ask for things to be promoted. They can't see anyone else's list, or change the framework.
- Owner runs everything.
More than one church
If you help more than one church — a network, a plant, a friend's — you don't need separate accounts. Click your church name in the header and you'll get a menu of everywhere you belong, plus + New church.
Each church is completely separate: its own channels, levels, campaigns, people and billing. Switching reloads the app pointed somewhere else, and nothing crosses over.
Requests
Staff can ask for things to be promoted rather than catching you in a corridor. A request lands in a queue, not on the calendar — asking isn't the same as deciding.
When you accept one, you pick the level and the date, and it builds the campaign there and then. When you decline, you give a reason, and they see it. That last part is worth doing properly: “too close to Christmas, let's look at January” is a much better answer than silence.
Calendars
Everyone gets a private calendar link under their own name. They subscribe once and their work appears in Google, Apple or Outlook, dated by when it has to be ready. It keeps itself current.
There's a church-wide one too, under Church settings — everything across the whole church with each person's name on it. Useful on a shared team calendar or a screen in the office.
Changing the framework
Settings → Framework. Levels on one tab, channels on the other.
Each rule says: on this channel, make this, on this day, this many weeks out, ready this many days early. Weeks are counted from the event, so three weeks before means the whole week sitting three weeks earlier.
The day itself and the “days before” options work differently — they count from the event's own date rather than from a weekday. That's what makes a reminder set two days out still land two days out when an event falls on a Wednesday.
Edits apply to new campaigns. Ones you've already built keep the schedule they were given, because half of it may already have gone out. To bring an existing one in line, open it and choose Rebuild from rules — anything already ticked off stays put.
Sermon series
The Teaching tab plans a run of Sundays. A series holds the weeks; each week holds what's being taught, who's speaking, and anything happening that morning.
Work comes from two places, and you build them separately:
- The series — the graphic, the trailer, the announcement. Built from the first Sunday backwards.
- Each Sunday — slides, clips, discussion questions. Built from that Sunday's own date.
A series needs at least one Sunday in it before it can build the promotion, because there's nothing to count back from until then.
Billing
Your church gets 15 days free. After that Promo Engine closes until a subscription starts. Nothing is deleted — every campaign, schedule and note is exactly where you left it, and it all comes back the moment you subscribe.
Click your church name → Billing. One price covers everyone on your team; there's no charge per person. Payment goes through Stripe, so we never see your card, and you can cancel any time from the same page.
When something looks wrong
Somebody says they never got an email
Notifications go out when an item is assigned to somebody new. Editing a note or moving a date deliberately doesn't send anything — otherwise people learn to ignore them within a week. Check their spam folder, and check the address under Church settings.
A calendar isn't updating
Calendar apps refresh on their own schedule, usually every few hours, and none of them let a publisher force it. A change won't show instantly. If it hasn't moved in a day, unsubscribe and re-add the link.
A campaign has no items
Its level has no rules, or the schedule was never built. Open the campaign and choose Build the schedule.
Something changed and I didn't mean it
Anything destructive asks first and tells you what will happen. There's no undo beyond that, so the confirmations are worth reading rather than clicking through.
Still stuck
Email hello@promoengine.church. A real person reads it.