Email notifications about updates to saved opportunities

[mxk0]

Summary

This epic includes the initial implementation for email notifications about new opportunities matching a saved search.

For discussion at our Jan 28 kickoff:

• What types of updates are worthy of a notification? Do we know what opportunity updates existing Grants.gov notifies about?

Probability of success and key risks

Date of delivery (estimated)

April 15, 2025

[mxk0]

Notes from Jan 28 discussion

What types of updates are worthy of a notification? Do we know what opportunity updates existing Grants.gov notifies about?

• In the current system, a general "This opportunity was updated" based on any change (large or small) to an opportunity.
• Users sometimes find this spammy because of the volume of emails.
• Opportunity for NLP to determine what merits an email notification?
• Or, more structured/field-based? Rough heuristic?
• Use the search index as our heuristic; did the change get pushed to the search index?
• Maybe too tied into how the search index works. Index gets updated instantly, notification might get sent out later.
• How are we getting emails out? vs. How do we control these emails?
• We don't have versioning (i.e. opportunity history), might need to sort this out first
• Existing Grants.gov does have an opportunity history table
• Opportunity history would enable us to decide what merits an email notification
• Existing Grants.gov: "These opps have been created, updated, or deleted"
• Example: https://grants.gov/search-results-detail/42048, click "Version History"
• Even if we start with the same very-basic logic, we can improve the email UX
• Doing the infra work to get version history unblocks emails, version history on opp listings on the site
• Improving the UX of emails could be a motivation to get more traffic to Simpler
• Should we email users about upcoming due dates? Maybe a quick path to value add without having to rely on version history.
• Version history is a very large effort

Action items

• Start scoping out version history work (to potentially power email notifications, version history on the opp listing page, etc.) and decide when we want to prioritize it (create spike ticket and link here)
• Simple first implementation for email notifications about updates to opportunities, with new functionality that alerts users to saved opps with upcoming close dates (create design ticket and link here)