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Automated Communication Pipeline

Run the Automated Communication Pipeline MicroSim fullscreen

About This MicroSim

Automation is what stops a volunteer writing the same reminder email fifty-two times a year. The risk it introduces is different: a system that can send messages without anyone deciding to will, if you let it, text families about everything.

The urgency gate is the guard against that. A session three days away, a closure announced this morning, a new month beginning -- all of these fire the same rule engine, and the gate sorts them. Anything a family must act on within hours goes out as a text. Everything else is queued, not sent, and swept up by the next scheduled newsletter.

Queuing is the design decision worth dwelling on. It is what makes the difference between a club that families stay subscribed to and one they mute. The two paths converge on the same outcome -- the family knows -- and the only thing that differed was how urgently it had to arrive.

How to Use

  • Hover a step to preview it; click to pin the details.
  • Follow both branches from the urgency gate to the shared end node.
  • Note that the newsletter path has an extra step: queued items wait for a scheduled send rather than going out one at a time.

Lesson Plan

Bloom level: Analyze (L4) -- differentiate

Learning objective: Given a trigger condition, the learner differentiates whether it should route through SMS notification or newsletter automation.

Before the sim (5 min). Ask how many messages a family gets from the club in a typical month, and how many they actually read. The gap is what this pipeline manages.

With the sim (10 min). Walk both paths, then propose triggers and route them aloud: "session cancelled, starts in two hours", "next term's dates published", "a new mentor joined."

After the sim (15 min). List every automatic message the club currently sends and sort each into one of the two paths. Anything that cannot be justified as time-sensitive belongs in the newsletter.

Check for understanding. Ask: "Why not just text everything? It reaches people fastest." Because a channel used for everything gets muted, and then it reaches nobody when it matters.

Embedding This MicroSim

Paste this into any page of the book, adjusting the relative path to docs/sims/ for the page's depth:

<iframe src="../../sims/automated-communication-pipeline/main.html" width="100%" height="682" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Specification

The full specification below is extracted from Chapter 25: Analyzing Club Data and Choosing the Right Tools.

Type: workflow
**sim-id:** automated-communication-pipeline<br/>
**Library:** Mermaid<br/>
**Status:** Specified

Purpose: Show how a single automated trigger routes to either SMS notification or newsletter automation depending on urgency, so a mentor can see why the same reminder system produces two very different-feeling messages.

Bloom Taxonomy: Analyze (L4)
Bloom Taxonomy Verb: differentiate

Learning objective: Given a trigger condition, the learner differentiates whether it should route through SMS notification or newsletter automation.

Steps (flowchart with a decision diamond):
1. Start: "Trigger Event Occurs" -- click reveals "A rule fires automatically -- a session is three days away, a closure is announced, or a new month begins -- with no mentor manually deciding to send anything."
2. Decision: "Time-Sensitive?" -- click reveals "Time-sensitive means a family needs to see the message within hours, not days, to act on it."
3a. Branch "Yes" leads to "Send SMS Notification" -- click reveals "A short text delivered directly to a phone, typically read within minutes."
3b. Branch "No" leads to "Queue for Newsletter Automation" -- click reveals "Added to the next scheduled digest instead of sent immediately, since it can safely wait."
4. Process (from 3b): "Newsletter Sent on Schedule" -- click reveals "A templated digest goes out on a fixed day each month, automatically pulling in every queued item."
5. End (both branches converge): "Family Informed" -- click reveals "Both paths end with the family seeing the information -- the only difference is how urgently it needed to arrive."

Interactivity requirement (satisfied): every node has a Mermaid `click` directive tied to an infobox showing its revealed text.

Color coding: Gray for the start node, purple for the decision diamond, amber for the SMS branch, blue for the newsletter branch, green for the converged end state.

Implementation: Mermaid flowchart (`graph TD`) rendered in main.html with `click NodeId call showInfo("NodeId")` directives for every node, opening a side-panel infobox.

References