Events, not a calendar.
Nothing here is sent because it is Tuesday. Every one of the twelve messages is fired by something actually happening — a crop stage changing, a parcel moving, a camera going live, a drop opening — which is why there are weeks with nothing in them at all.
01/ 04
The four things that fire a message.
Every message on the estate comes from one of these four, plus the three account events that fire on a date because they genuinely are dates.
A crop stage changes
The agronomist walks a field, decides it has reached a growth stage, and files it. That filing is the event. There are six of them on a wheat patch between drilling and harvest, and the gaps between them are wildly uneven — three in April, none at all in December.
Nobody schedules these. A cold March pushes the whole sequence back three weeks and the notifications move with it, which is the entire reason for building it this way.
- 6
- stages on wheat
- 0
- in December
- 3
- in a busy April
A delivery moves
Placed, picked, packed, collected, out for delivery, delivered. Six states, four of which produce a message if you have asked for them and one — collected — which never does, because nobody has ever wanted to know that a courier has been.
The out-for-delivery message comes from the courier rather than from us, which is why it carries a window and ours do not.
- 5
- states
- 2
- that message by default
- 1
- from the courier
A live event starts
A camera going live is an event. Lambing live, harvest live, the tasting, and the occasional thing that happens because Gerald has done something in the yard worth watching.
Ten minutes of notice, which is all a camera going live ever gives anybody, and never during quiet hours.
- 10 min
- notice
- 0
- scheduled in advance
- Push
- only
A drop opens
Stock arriving on a page with a quantity attached. Paid tiers get it twenty-four or forty-eight hours early depending on tier, which is a real event fired twice rather than one message with a delay on it.
The things that sell out do it in minutes, and this is the only warning anybody gets.
- 24h
- early at Mucking In
- 48h
- at Ploughing On
- Minutes
- to sell out
Event, or schedule.
| Message | Fired by | Predictable |
|---|---|---|
| A crop stage | The agronomist filing it | No. It moves with the weather |
| The combine | A moisture reading at dawn | No. Six hours of notice at best |
| A parcel moving | The warehouse or the courier | Partly. The dispatch day is fixed |
| A live camera | The camera coming online | No |
| A drop | Stock landing with a quantity on it | No, deliberately |
| Box about to ship | Three days before the cut-off | Yes. It is a date |
| Bushels expiring | Ninety and fourteen days out | Yes |
| Membership renewing | Three days before the charge | Yes |
Why nothing is sent on a schedule.
A marketing calendar produces messages that exist because it is the fifteenth. They are the ones that get unsubscribed from, and they are the reason most people’s push permission is switched off before anybody good gets to ask for it.
An event-driven system produces fewer messages, at unpredictable intervals, every one of which is about something that actually happened. It is worse for a campaign plan and considerably better for the person receiving it.
The cost is that some weeks are silent. In late December a member holding a wheat patch, a cask and a box may hear nothing at all for nineteen days. We think that is a feature.
What a real year of messages looks like.
| Month | Messages | What they were |
|---|---|---|
| October | 3 | Patch allocated, drilled, box shipping |
| November | 2 | Emergence counted, box shipping |
| December | 1 | Box shipping. Nothing else happened |
| January | 4 | Lambing live, an animal update, a box, a drop |
| February | 2 | Lambing finished, box shipping |
| April | 5 | Three growth stages, a box and a drop |
| August | 6 | The combine, the weighbridge, bad news about the durum, and three deliveries |
Triggers, questioned.
Yes, and about a fifth of members do. It collapses everything except the three exempt events into one email on a Friday morning.
Because nothing happened. A December with no message in it is an accurate description of a wheat field in December.
Only a drop, and only because early access is genuinely a separate event at a separate time. Everything else fires once.
The full matrix.
Twelve events, three channels, and a cap you can see.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/estate/the-money/
/estate/recording/
/estate/sitemap/
