A campaign is always in one of four statuses. Which one it is in decides whether it sends.
The four statuses
Draft has never been published. It sends nothing, and it is the only status you can delete.
Active is published and sending. This is the only status that reaches guests.
Inactive is published but not sending. The campaign is finished and ready, and it will start the moment you switch it on.
Archived is put away and will not send. Archived campaigns do not appear in the list by default. To see them, set the Status filter to Archived. Archiving is reversible, but recovering a campaign brings it back as Inactive rather than to the status it had, so one that was sending needs switching back on afterwards.
Draft and Inactive both send nothing, so why two
A Draft has never been published, so there is no finished version of it anywhere. An Inactive campaign has been published at least once, so a complete version exists and is ready to go.
In practice: use Draft while you are still building, and Inactive for a campaign you have finished but do not want running yet, such as a seasonal offer.
The quickest way to check a campaign's status
Open the campaign's three-dot menu. The first thing in it is a plain sentence telling you where the campaign stands:
"Campaign is active and will be sent to your guests."
"Campaign is inactive and will not be sent to your guests."
"Campaign is archived and will not be sent to your guests."
Directly underneath sits the action that changes it, so Stop sending on an active campaign and Start sending on an inactive one.
An archived campaign is the exception: its Recover button sits on the card itself, as a green button, rather than in the menu.
You can also read it off the list without opening anything. Every card has a small coloured dot beside the campaign name: green for Active and sending, and grey for a campaign that is not sending. Both Inactive and Draft are grey, so use the badge to tell them apart. A Draft is badged DRAFT, and a grey dot with no badge is an Inactive campaign. An archived campaign has its own dot colour.
For a quick audit across a lot of campaigns, switch the list to table view using the toggle at the right-hand end of the filter row. The table has a Status column naming the status of every campaign, which is faster than reading dots one at a time.
Two things to know about the table view: it is paginated, where the board shows every campaign at once, and the choice of view is not remembered. Leave the screen and come back and you are on the board again.
What moves a campaign between them
From | Action | To |
Draft | Publish As Inactive on the Review and Publish step | Inactive |
Draft | Publish & Start Sending on the Review and Publish step | Active |
Active | Stop sending in the campaign's three-dot menu | Inactive |
Inactive | Start sending in the campaign's three-dot menu | Active |
Active or Inactive | Archive in the three-dot menu | Archived |
Draft | Delete in the three-dot menu | gone |
Archived | Recover on the archived campaign's card | Inactive |
What else?
Below the status sentence and its action, the menu is grouped into two sections, and what appears depends on the campaign's status.
Insights
View Templates, a rendered preview of the message as a guest receives it. On any published campaign. See Preview a campaign without opening it.
Whatsapp Templates, the approval status of the campaign's WhatsApp templates. Only on campaigns that use WhatsApp. See WhatsApp message templates.
View Report.
Actions
Edit, which reads Edit (Unpublished Changes) when edits are waiting to be published.
Duplicate.
Archive, or Delete on a draft.
A Draft has the shortest menu: Duplicate, Delete and Edit, with no Insights section, because there is nothing published to look at yet.
An Archived campaign has a short menu too, with its templates and Duplicate but no Edit and no Start sending, because Recover has to come first.
Archive and Delete are not the same thing
Delete only appears on drafts, and it is permanent.
Archive is for campaigns that have been published, and it is reversible. Archiving takes a campaign out of the working list without destroying its history, which matters because a published campaign has reporting attached to it. If you are tidying up a list of old campaigns, Archive is the one you want, not Delete.
To bring one back, set the Status filter to Archived and click Recover on the card. Two things to expect. The campaign returns to its original band in the list with its category and its history intact, and it returns as Inactive, whatever it was before. If it was sending before it was archived, recovering it is only half the job: check the dot beside its name and switch it back on.
A campaign showing unpublished changes
A published campaign can also carry an UNPUBLISHED CHANGES badge. That is not a fifth status. It means the campaign is still sending its last published version while your edits sit unpublished. See Why an edit to a live campaign is not sending yet.
Getting help
Open Talk to Us in the left menu of the platform, or email [email protected]. Tell us the campaign name and the status you expected it to be in.