Advisory

An official announcement, but not a law or formal regulation, from a government organization. This content type can come in many forms, such as a guidance or memorandum.

Why use this content type?

An Advisory is an official government announcement about a specific subject and can take many forms, such as a guidance or memorandum. You also have flexibility when it comes to specifying the Advisory’s status, such as draft or proposed.

Alternatives to Advisories

Advisories tend to fall in between News announcements or Events, and official Rules of Court or Executive Orders. Use those content types if more appropriate.

Note that Events can display on Advisories.

Overview

Title

To the extent you’re allowed to, based on the type of Advisory you are publishing, write the title using language you think your audience would use. It’s also a good idea to Google your intended title or conduct a search in “All content” in the CMS to see if it’s identical to the title of existing Mass.gov content.

Short title

Optional. This field is used to shorten the full title of a page when displayed in a breadcrumb. First aim to shorten the actual page title if it’s long, but not so much that the title is no longer clear if someone comes directly to a page from a search engine.

Type

You must choose the type of Advisory you are publishing, and the type you choose will be displayed just above the title of your page.

Use the dropdown menu to choose from more than a dozen kinds of Advisories, such as guidance, letter, and policy statement. If you don’t see 1 that fits your needs, make a ServiceNow request for a new type to be added to the list.

Advisory Status

This optional field lets you indicate the status of your Advisory, such as draft or proposed.

The status will display at the very top of the Advisory. The status could be changed or removed if your Advisory is updated.

Date

This required field shows when the Advisory was first published.

There’s currently no way to indicate via this field if the content has been revised. A workaround is to add that information in the overview section, which appears shortly after the date field on the page.

Issuer

Optional field in which the Organization(s) or Person issuing this document is selected.

The issuer(s) appears directly under the date near the top of the page.

Referenced Sources

Add at least 1 legal citation related to the Advisory by filling in the URL. If it’s an existing Mass.gov page, the page title will automatically be chosen, though you can overwrite it.

Referenced Sources display beneath the issuing organization near the top of the page. They also display at the bottom of the page in a desktop view, or just above Related Links, if those are used, in a mobile view.

Overview

An optional short description that precedes the text of the Advisory.

This field can be used to indicate whether the document has been updated and if so, when and what has changed.

Listing description

An optional short description that helps to explain your Advisory when it appears in Curated Lists and search results. This information will not appear on the Advisory itself.

Parent page field

The required Parent page field appears on all public-facing content types and it powers the breadcrumb-based navigation system.

The Mass.gov team prepopulated the field based on an analysis of which child pages belong to which parent pages. Each child page can be assigned only 1 parent, or higher-level page.

These connections, displayed in the form of breadcrumbs (i.e., links) above the page title, will help Mass.gov visitors find their way to relevant information regardless of where they start on the site.

Organization(s)

Select the organization or organizations issuing the Advisory. The name will appear at the top of the page.

Intended audience

This field isn’t being used yet, so there’s no need to fill it in.

Label(s)

This is optional, however it is very helpful. Add one or more labels to be used to used for grouping and finding related content and documents within the CMS.

Start typing in the Label(s) field to choose an existing label from a dropdown menu that will appear or add a new label by entering it directly. You also can use labels so that your Advisory can become part of an automatic list within a Curated List.

Be sure to create specific labels. The label field is shared across the whole site, so your label should be unique and identifiable to prevent overlap with others.

Collections

Optional. Most content will not be in a Collection. Only add content to a collection if the collection creator has approved it. In that case, select any collections, topics, and subtopics for this content.

If you later need to remove a page from a Collection, go back into the page and uncheck the box and select Save.

Learn more about collections.

Details tab

Section Title and Body

These fields are optional but recommended to provide an accessible, full-text version of the Advisory in addition to a document download.

The Advisory can be divided into sections, which can be easier to scan via a table of contents that will automatically be created if you have more than 1 section.

Using 1 section, plus filling out the contact field under the “Related” tab, will also result in a table of contents being created.

Footnotes

This rich text field allows you to enter footnotes as a numbered list.

Download

An optional download of the Advisory document. If you do not offer a full-text version, we recommend offering a PDF or Word document version. You can provide both the full-text and document editions.

Contact

Include contact information if this information needs to be displayed on the page. You can choose from an existing contact information item or create one.

Add links to pages on Mass.gov or external links. These links display on the right side of the page in a desktop view and at the bottom on mobile devices.

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