Send stakeholders a usage digest they'll actually read

A weekly email that pushes the three numbers that matter to the people who asked for them — replacing the dashboard link nobody opens.

When to run it

Someone important asked to "stay in the loop" on usage, you shared a dashboard, and the view counts say what view counts always say. Dashboards answer questions people remember to ask; a digest shows up in the inbox where the audience already lives, on a rhythm they don't have to maintain.

Why it works

A digest inverts the effort: instead of the stakeholder pulling numbers, the numbers push themselves — pre-summarized, at a fixed weekly moment that builds the reading habit. The discipline it forces is editorial: picking the three numbers that matter is the work the dashboard was letting everyone skip. For customer-facing versions the same mechanics double as retention — a weekly "here's what your account did" email is a weekly reason the product stays installed.

The play

1. Pick three numbers and one trend. If the digest needs a scroll bar, it's a dashboard again.
2. Collapse the week's activity into one email per recipient — never one email per event.
3. Land it at the same local time every week; the consistency is what builds the habit.
4. Put the "why" next to each number — the digest is read by people who don't know what a normal week looks like.

Ship it with Hogsend

ctx.digest absorbs a rolling week of events into one execution and records the flush, so a replay can't double-send and there's no idempotency bookkeeping of your own. Grouping the events is plain TypeScript.

import { days, defineJourney, sendEmail } from "@hogsend/engine";

export const weeklyDigest = defineJourney({
  meta: {
    id: "weekly-usage-digest",
    // Any activity opens a window; the rest of the week folds in.
    trigger: { event: "report.created" },
    entryLimit: "unlimited", // a fresh window opens after each flush
    // The digest already collapses the week — no extra min-gap on top.
    suppress: days(0),
  },
  run: async (user, ctx) => {
    const digest = await ctx.digest({ window: days(7) });
    const byType = Object.groupBy(digest.events, (e) => e.name);
    await sendEmail({
      to: user.email,
      userId: user.id,
      template: "retention/weekly-digest",
      props: { sections: byType },
    });
  },
});

That's the rolling, per-user shape. The whole-audience-every-Monday shape is deliberately not a journey — it's one query in a cron task. Both variants, with the trade-offs, are in the weekly digest recipe.

How you'll know

Opens and clicks on the digest itself — Hogsend's tracking is first-party, so both are on the send row with no provider settings. The number to watch over a quarter: does the stakeholder stop asking for ad-hoc reports?