On this page
Drafts and feedback, targeting, notifications and later changes.
From draft to published
Every objective starts as a draft. A draft can be edited freely and is visible only to HQ until you choose otherwise.
Before publishing, you can open the draft for franchisee input:
- Owners and your franchisee advisory council can comment.
- They can vote the draft up or down.
- They can opt in to a test group that receives the priority first.
Change in a franchise system works through influence, not decree. Drafts that owners have seen and shaped tend to land better, and the test-group opt-in lets you test a priority with willing units before it goes system-wide.
Objective statuses are draft, published, paused and archived.
Targeting: who gets it
Targeting rules decide which units a priority applies to. You can combine:
- Regions, including everything beneath them in the tree.
- Specific franchisees or specific units.
- Unit attributes, such as format, opening year or service line.
- Exclusions for units the priority doesn’t fit.
You also choose the level: unit-level priorities create one assignment per unit, and franchisee-level priorities create one per ownership group.
Before publishing, SignaUnit shows a scope preview: the list of units and owners who will receive it. Aim a priority only where it fits. A promotion built around one product line shouldn’t land on units that don’t carry it.
What happens when you publish
Publishing is designed to be safe to retry and impossible to half-finish:
- The version is locked. SignaUnit writes the new version and queues a fan-out job in the same database transaction. Either both happen or neither does.
- Targeting is resolved. A background worker works out which units are in scope and compares that with the existing assignments. It creates, updates or waives assignments, keyed on objective, unit and period, so running it twice gives the same result.
- Owners are notified. Each affected owner (and the field consultants covering those units) gets one notification, batched across priorities.
- Rollups refresh. Affected regions and franchisees are marked for recompute.
Notifications that respect people’s time
A brand with hundreds of units shouldn’t send hundreds of pushes. SignaUnit batches notifications per person (“3 new priorities from HQ”) and delivers them by urgency:
| Need | Channel |
|---|---|
| New or changed priority for an owner | iPhone push, batched and held during quiet hours in the unit’s time zone, plus the in-app inbox |
| Daily “what matters today” | A local notification at the time the owner chooses, built from cached data |
| HQ dashboard open in a browser | A live “something changed” signal so the view refreshes |
| Escalation (due soon, not acknowledged) | Push, then email, then a flag to the field consultant |
All of these go to owners and HQ users. None of them go to franchisee staff.
A weekly digest email is Planned.
Recurring priorities
A priority with a monthly cadence creates the next period’s assignments automatically at each period boundary, in each unit’s own time zone. Weekly cadence is reserved for metrics that come from an import, so owners aren’t asked to fill in a weekly form.
New units and org changes
When a unit opens, moves to a different region, or changes attributes, SignaUnit re-resolves targeting for that unit. New units pick up live priorities automatically, and units that move out of scope have their assignments closed.
Changing a published priority
Published versions are immutable. To change one, edit it to create a new version:
- If the change is material (target, due date, scope), owners are asked to re-acknowledge. An acknowledgement of the old version stays on record against that version.
- If it’s minor, the new version replaces the old one quietly.
You can also pause a priority (no new nudges, status frozen) or archive it when it’s done.
Exceptions and waivers
Some units can’t reasonably meet a given priority. An owner can request an exception, and the field consultant or HQ decides. A waived assignment is excluded from the unit’s adoption and status. Waivers are HQ-only and every one is logged.
Letting a region tighten or relax a target, with HQ approval and without copying the priority, is Planned.