Acknowledgement Campaigns, User Lists & Reminders

This page covers the tools that help you get acknowledgements done: user lists (named groups of people to target), acknowledgement campaigns (groups of documents tracked as one drive), and every reminder and notification email the plugin sends — automatic and manual. All of it is part of the Free plugin; Pro adds escalation to document owners and an escalation manager.

For how acknowledgements themselves work, see The Acknowledgement System.

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User lists

A user list is a named group of specific people — for example “Clinical staff plus three named project leads” — that you can ask to acknowledge a document alongside, or instead of, WordPress roles. Use one when a role is too broad or too narrow and you don’t want to create a new role.

Where: Policy Management → Settings → User Management → User Lists. The section lists every list with Name, Members, Last Updated and an Edit action.

Creating a list

1. On the User Lists section, click Add New User List.
2. Enter a title (the list’s name).
3. In the Members box, type at least two characters of a person’s name or email in Search users. Up to 10 matches appear; click one to add it. Use Remove to take someone off.
4. Click Publish (or Update). Only published lists can be chosen on documents.

A ← Back to Settings → User Management link at the top of the edit screen returns you to the list overview.

Using a list on a document

In the document’s Acknowledgement sidebar panel, under Who must acknowledge, tick the list under Target user lists. The audience is everyone in the ticked roles plus everyone on the ticked lists, each person counted once.

Changes to a list’s membership take effect straight away for every document that uses it. People added to a list are asked to acknowledge; people removed are no longer counted as outstanding (their past acknowledgements are kept).

Who can manage lists

Administrators can create, edit and delete lists. The Policy Auditor role can view them but not change them. Searching for members requires permission to list site users, which administrators have.

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Acknowledgement campaigns

A campaign groups several documents so you can track and chase them as one drive — for example “FY26 Annual Policy Review”, “New Starter Induction Pack” or “WHS Update March 2026”. Campaigns are available whenever the acknowledgement system is on; there is no separate switch.

Creating a campaign

1. Go to Documents → Ack Campaigns.
2. Under Add New Campaign, enter a Name and, optionally, a description.
3. Optionally set a Due Date — the completion deadline shown on the Compliance Overview, where it is flagged “(overdue)” once passed.
4. Click Add New Campaign.

The campaign list shows Documents, Due Date and Status (Active or Archived) for each campaign. Hover over a campaign for these actions:

• Clone — creates “Name (Copy)” with the same due date and the same documents. Handy for next year’s review.
• Archive — hides a finished campaign from the Compliance Overview and the campaign report picker. Its document assignments are kept.
• Restore — brings an archived campaign back.

Adding documents to a campaign

1. Open the document and make sure Require acknowledgement is on.
2. In the Acknowledgement Content & Comprehension box below the editor, tick one or more campaigns under Acknowledgement Campaigns.
3. Save the document.

A document can belong to several campaigns. If no campaigns exist yet, the box shows “No campaigns yet. Create a campaign to assign documents.” Only published acknowledgement-required documents count towards a campaign.

Campaign progress

• Policy Management → Compliance Overview → Campaign completion shows, for each active campaign, the number of Documents, Acknowledged and Pending counts, Completion, Due Date and a View report → link.
• Policy Management → Acknowledgements → Reports, Report Type: Campaign, then Select Campaign and Generate Report, gives the Campaign Acknowledgement Report: totals for Documents, Acknowledged, Pending and Completion Rate, and one row per person (User, Email, Required, Acknowledged, Pending, Pending Documents — up to six titles are listed).

Sending campaign reminders

When a campaign report shows outstanding acknowledgements, a Send reminders to … pending users button appears below the table. (The number on the button counts outstanding document-and-person pairs, so it can be higher than the number of people.)

1. Click the button and confirm.
2. Each person with at least one outstanding campaign document receives one email listing all of their outstanding documents in that campaign.

Limits and behaviour:

• Each campaign can be sent once per day. A second attempt shows “This campaign has already been blasted today. Wait until tomorrow to send again.”
• People who have opted out of reminder emails are skipped.
• If everything is done, you see “All campaign documents are acknowledged — no reminders needed.”
• The email uses the same layout as the annual consolidated reminder. Its subject is the Consolidated Compliance Reminder subject line.

Known limitation: the campaign email states an “annual compliance deadline” of 31 December and counts the days remaining to that date. It does not use your Annual Compliance Date or the campaign’s Due Date. Mention the real deadline in your own communications until this is corrected.

Who can manage campaigns

Creating, editing, cloning, archiving and blasting campaigns requires acknowledgement-management rights (administrators by default). Anyone who can edit a document can tick it into an existing campaign.

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Reminders and notifications

The plugin sends acknowledgement-related email in four ways:

1. Automatically, per document, as an acknowledgement approaches expiry and after it has expired.
2. Automatically, once per person, before your annual compliance date.
3. By hand, from the Acknowledgements screen, the Compliance Overview, or a campaign report.
4. As events happen — a confirmation after acknowledging, and a notice when a new version needs re-acknowledgement.

All reminder settings are on Policy Management → Settings → Acknowledgements & Notifications, in the Reminders & Schedules section.

Tip: Confirm your site can send email before relying on reminders. Use a transactional email plugin (such as an SMTP plugin) and send yourself a test. Emails go to each person’s WordPress account email address, from the From Name and From Email set on Settings → System Configuration.

Before an acknowledgement expires

Once a day, the plugin emails people whose existing acknowledgement is about to expire. The lead times depend on the document’s Risk Rating (set in the document’s Compliance & Status box):

Risk tier	Reminded before expiry (default)	Follow-up after expiry (default)
Critical	30, 14, 7 and 1 days before	every 3 days
High	30, 7 and 1 days before	every 7 days
Medium	30 and 7 days before	every 14 days
Low	14 days before	none
Unrated	the Individual document reminder schedule (default 30, 7 and 1)	none

• Each lead-time reminder is sent at most once per acknowledgement cycle. When the person renews, the cycle starts again.
• The email is Acknowledgement Expiring Soon (“Your acknowledgement for the following document will expire in … days”), with the document title, expiry date and a Review Document button.
• These reminders are about renewing an existing acknowledgement. People who have never acknowledged a document are chased with the annual compliance date, manual reminders, or campaign reminders instead.

After an acknowledgement has expired

Once a day, for documents whose tier has a follow-up interval, the plugin sends an Acknowledgement Overdue email on days that are a whole multiple of that interval after the expiry date (for a Critical document: 3, 6, 9… days overdue). Follow-ups run for up to a year after expiry.

Set a risk rating to enable overdue chasing. A document left — Unrated — still sends pre-expiry reminders, but never sends follow-ups after expiry. The same is true of Low by default.

Editing the schedules

Setting	What it does	Default	Allowed values
Review & reminder cadence by risk tier	One row per tier (Critical, High, Medium, Low) with Review cycle (days), Pre-due reminders (days before, comma-separated) and Overdue repeat (days, 0 = off).	See table above. Review cycles: 182, 365, 548 and 730 days	Review cycle 1–3650; reminder days 1–365 each; overdue repeat 0–365
Individual document reminder schedule (days before due)	Lead times for unrated documents, e.g. 14,7,1. Also sets the safeguard window for annual and period-schedule expiry (see Acknowledgement expiry).	30, 7, 1	Comma-separated whole days
Individual Reminder Body	The body text of reminders an administrator sends by hand (see below).	A short message with the document title and link	Plain text. Placeholders: {user_name}, {document_title}, {document_url}
Annual Compliance Date	An annual deadline (MM-DD). Leave empty to turn off annual reminders.	Empty (off)	MM-DD
Compliance reminder schedule (days before due)	Days before the annual date on which to send the consolidated email. Leave blank to send none.	30, 14, 7	Comma-separated whole days

The review-cycle column and the Enable Review Alerts / Review reminder schedule settings in the same section control document review reminders to owners, not acknowledgements. See Version Control & Owner Approvals.

Note: The Individual document reminder schedule field says “Leave blank to disable these reminders”, but a blank value actually falls back to the default 30, 7 and 1 days. To stop pre-expiry reminders for unrated documents, give those documents a risk rating whose pre-due list is empty instead.

Note: The Individual Reminder Body field lists a {days_remaining} placeholder. Manual reminders have no expiry countdown, so this placeholder is replaced with nothing.

Annual compliance date (consolidated reminders)

Set an Annual Compliance Date (for example 06-30 for the end of the Australian financial year). On each day in the Compliance reminder schedule before that date, every person with at least one outstanding acknowledgement — never acknowledged, expired or outdated — receives one email listing all of their outstanding documents, with the deadline and days remaining.

• Subject: “Action Required: … Document(s) Awaiting Your Acknowledgement” (or your custom Consolidated Compliance Reminder subject).
• The daily check that sends these runs only while a date is set. After you set a date, it starts within about an hour.
• People who have opted out of reminder emails don’t receive it.

Sending reminders by hand

From Policy Management → Acknowledgements → Overview, click View Pending on a document to open Pending Acknowledgements:

• Send Reminder next to a person emails them immediately.
• Tick several people (or the select-all box) and click Send Reminder to {n} Selected to email them now.
• Click Schedule…, pick a date and time in Send reminders at: (your site’s time zone) and click Confirm Schedule to send later. The time must be in the future.

You can also click Send reminder on a row of the Compliance Overview’s Acknowledgements expiring soon list.

These emails use the Admin Acknowledgement Reminder subject (“Reminder: Document Acknowledgement Required”) and the Individual Reminder Body text if you set one, otherwise a standard message with a Review & Acknowledge button.

How the different paths behave:

Path	When it sends	Skips people who have opted out?	Skips people who acknowledged in the meantime?
A single person, or up to 25 selected	Immediately; the window reports “Sent … reminder(s). … failed.”	No — a deliberate administrator reminder always sends	Not applicable (sent now)
More than 25 selected	Queued and sent in the background within a few minutes (“Queued reminders for … user(s)…”)	Yes	Yes, and anyone no longer in the audience
Schedule…	At the chosen time	Yes	Yes, and anyone no longer in the audience

Daily limit: bulk reminders for one document are capped at 500 recipients per day. Past that you see “Daily bulk reminder cap of 500 reached for this document. Try again tomorrow or narrow your recipient list.”

Only administrators (acknowledgement-management rights) can send or schedule reminders. The Policy Auditor sees the screen in view-only mode.

Confirmation and re-acknowledgement emails

• Acknowledgement Confirmed — sent to the person as soon as an acknowledgement is recorded, including one recorded on their behalf. Shows the document, version and date, with a View Document button.
• Updated Document Requires Acknowledgement — sent when a new version at or above your Re-Acknowledgement Trigger Level goes live. A background job sends it about a minute later to everyone in the audience who no longer has a valid acknowledgement. It shows the new version with a Review & Acknowledge button.

Opting out of reminder emails

A staff member can tick Do not send me repeat reminder emails for outstanding document acknowledgements. under Document Acknowledgement Notifications → Reminder Emails on their own WordPress profile. An administrator editing that person’s profile sees the same option.

Opting out stops:

• pre-expiry reminders and after-expiry follow-ups;
• the annual consolidated reminder;
• campaign reminders;
• queued (more than 25 people) and scheduled manual reminders.

It does not stop the confirmation email, re-acknowledgement notices after a new version, or a reminder an administrator sends immediately to 25 people or fewer. The acknowledgement is still required and compliance figures are unaffected. A Reminders opted out badge appears on the person’s User Acknowledgement Report, so you can tell “ignored the reminder” from “never received one”.

Email subject lines

Every email above has an editable subject line under Settings → Acknowledgements & Notifications → Email Subject Lines. Leave a field blank to use the default. Use {title} for the document title where it applies. Your site name is always added in square brackets at the start of each subject.

Email (label in settings)	Default subject	Sent to
Acknowledgement Confirmation	Acknowledgement Confirmed: {title}	The person who acknowledged
Acknowledgement Expiring Soon	Acknowledgement Expiring Soon: {title}	The person whose acknowledgement is expiring
Acknowledgement Overdue	Acknowledgement Overdue: {title}	The person whose acknowledgement has expired
Re-acknowledgement Required	Updated Document Requires Acknowledgement: {title}	Everyone who must re-acknowledge a new version
Consolidated Compliance Reminder	Action Required: … Document(s) Awaiting Your Acknowledgement	Each person with outstanding documents (annual date or campaign)
Admin Acknowledgement Reminder	Reminder: Document Acknowledgement Required	People an administrator chases by hand

Email bodies (other than the manual reminder body) are fixed. The same section also holds the subjects for review, version-approval and edit-suggestion emails, which are covered on their own pages.

Scheduled jobs at a glance

Job	How often	What it does
Expiry reminders	Daily	Sends Acknowledgement Expiring Soon emails on each lead day.
Overdue follow-ups	Daily	Sends Acknowledgement Overdue emails on each follow-up day. Pro escalation runs straight after.
Annual compliance check	Daily, only while an Annual Compliance Date is set	Sends consolidated reminders on scheduled days before the date.
Re-acknowledgement notices	Once, about a minute after a qualifying new version	Sends Updated Document Requires Acknowledgement emails.
Queued bulk reminders	Once, about a minute after you send to more than 25 people	Sends the queued manual reminders.
Scheduled reminders	Once, at the time you picked	Sends your scheduled manual reminders.

These rely on WordPress’s built-in scheduler, which runs when your site gets visits. On a quiet site, ask your host to set up a real server cron job so reminders go out on time.

Escalation to owners and an escalation manager (Pro)

🔒 Pro feature — requires the Pro plugin.

When reminders haven’t worked on a high-stakes document, Pro escalates the overdue acknowledgement up the chain:

Document risk	Document owner notified at	Escalation manager notified at
Critical	7 days overdue	14 days overdue
High	14 days overdue	—
Medium, Low, Unrated	—	—

Set up: choose the Escalation Manager (for example your Quality Assurance Manager) in the Reminders & Schedules section. Only people with acknowledgement-management rights can be chosen. Leave it on — No escalation manager — to skip the manager step. The document owner is the person assigned to the document’s owner title (see User Roles & Permissions). If a document has no assigned owner, the owner step is skipped.

Emails:

• The owner receives “Overdue acknowledgements need your attention: document title“, listing each overdue person with days overdue and an Open the acknowledgements register link.
• The manager receives “… overdue acknowledgement(s) escalated to you”, a table of document, person, risk tier and days overdue, with an Open the compliance overview link.

Each person and document is escalated once per expiry cycle at each step. The check runs daily, straight after the overdue follow-ups. Escalation subjects aren’t editable. For the Pro compliance calendar and more on escalations, see Compliance Calendar and Escalations (Pro).

Without Pro, there is no escalation step. Use the Compliance Overview’s Already expired list and manual reminders instead.

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Troubleshooting

Nobody is receiving reminder emails. Check your site can send email (send a test through your SMTP plugin). Then check that WordPress’s scheduler is running: on low-traffic sites, scheduled jobs only run when someone visits. Also check the people concerned haven’t opted out — look for the Reminders opted out badge on their user report.

People who have never acknowledged get no automatic reminders. That’s expected. Pre-expiry and overdue reminders only apply to people who acknowledged before. Set an Annual Compliance Date, use a campaign reminder, or send reminders by hand from View Pending.

Overdue follow-ups aren’t being sent. The document is probably — Unrated — or Low risk, which have no follow-up interval by default. Set a risk rating, or give the tier an Overdue repeat value above 0.

“This campaign has already been blasted today.” Campaign reminders are limited to once per campaign per day. Try again tomorrow, or chase individuals from the Acknowledgements screen.

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Worked example — a registered training organisation

Coastline Training (an RTO) runs an annual policy refresh for 40 trainers and assessors and 12 administration staff, due by 30 June.

1. User list: In Settings → User Management → User Lists, the compliance officer creates Assessors — VET with the 28 people who assess, because some trainers don’t assess and the Trainer role is too broad.
2. Campaign: Under Documents → Ack Campaigns, they create FY26 Policy Refresh with Due Date 30 June. They clone last year’s campaign to keep the same documents, then add the new Assessment Validation Procedure.
3. Audience: The Assessment Validation Procedure targets the Assessors — VET list. The other policies target the Trainer and Administration roles.
4. Risk: The Student Safety & Wellbeing Policy is rated Critical, so expiring acknowledgements are reminded at 30, 14, 7 and 1 days and chased every 3 days after expiry. With Pro, the policy owner hears about anyone 7 days overdue, and the Quality Manager (set as Escalation Manager) at 14 days.
5. Annual date: Annual Compliance Date is 06-30, with the default 30, 14 and 7 day schedule, so each person gets one email listing everything they still owe.
6. Mid-May check: The campaign report shows 9 people outstanding. The officer clicks Send reminders to … pending users once, then follows up two stragglers by hand with Send Reminder in View Pending.