The holiday season is your time to recharge—but your community shouldn’t go quiet just because you’re out of office! With Scheduled Posts and Automation Rules in Vanilla, you can keep the conversation flowing and critical tasks handled automatically. Here’s how to set it up so you enjoy your break with peace of mind. 🌟
🗓️ 1. Plan Ahead with Scheduled Posts
Write up a series of posts, questions, ideas, or articles before you leave and schedule them to publish while you’re away.
🔹 Why this helps:
Scheduled posts keep fresh content in your community—even when you’re offline—which encourages ongoing engagement.
🔹 How it works:
While you’re creating your content, use the Schedule option to pick a future date and time for publishing. You can schedule events, discussions, questions, or articles weeks in advance.
💡 Pro tip: Create a mix of evergreen tips, discussion prompts, or community highlights that resonate even without immediate moderation.
🤖 2. Set Up Automation Rules to Manage Tasks
Automation Rules can act like virtual helpers—automatically performing tasks based on triggers you define.
🔹 Escalate posts to support:
If a community member posts something that needs support attention, configure an Automation Rule to escalate it (e.g., to Zendesk, Freshdesk or another ticketing system). This ensures your support team doesn’t miss urgent issues while you’re away.
🔹 Handle flagged or inactive content:
Create rules to bump posts with no activity, add tags, or even escalate content that receives a set number of reports. This keeps content moving without manual oversight.
💡 Pro tip: Name your rules descriptively (“Holiday Escalations,” “Unanswered Questions Escalate”) so they’re easy to manage later.
🧠 Bonus Tips for a Smoother Holiday
✨ Run a final check: Before you leave, make sure all scheduled posts are set with the correct times and categories.
✨ Preview your Automation Rules: Run them once manually to ensure they behave as you expect.
✨ Let your community know: Consider publishing a friendly post letting members know you’ll be out but the community is still active—and give them tips on how to get quick help.
Enjoy your holidays—and let Vanilla do what it does best while you take a well-deserved break! 🎉
