Approve a Brief and Generate Content

Overview

Brief approval is the gate between planning and production. When a brief is Approved, CntX knows the topic, audience, and format are signed off and can generate a first draft linked to that brief.

This step is separate from editorial status (`In review`, `Approved`, `Published in CntX`) and CMS status (`Not synced`, `CMS draft`, `CMS published`). You approve the brief on the calendar first; you approve the written content later in the editor before pushing to WordPress or Webflow.

You can approve briefs individually, through Quick review, or in bulk from the briefs table. Batch Generate first drafts processes many approved briefs in the background while you keep working.

When to use

• One or more briefs are Needs review and ready for a decision.
• You finished editing titles, personas, or dates and want to unlock generation.
• A new strategy or campaign period produced a batch of draft briefs to validate.
• To do now shows briefs to validate or drafts to generate.

Before you start

• Read each brief’s title, channel, persona, pillar, and planned date—approval means you accept all of them.
• Confirm the item is not a duplicate or off-strategy topic you should remove instead.
• Set the correct generation focus strategy if you plan to run calendar-level batch generation afterward.
• Understand that approving without generating leaves the content item empty until you run Generate draft.

Steps

Approve a single brief

1. Open Calendar and find the item in Briefs view or on the date grid.
2. Open the brief and verify fields match strategy and capacity for that week.
3. Change brief status to Approved, or use Approve and generate if you want approval and draft generation in one action.
4. Wait for generation to finish if you triggered it. The item’s next action moves to Open editor or Review content.

Quick review workflow

1. From Calendar, open Quick review (or To do now → Quick review).
2. For each brief, choose Approve, Edit, or Remove.
3. Optionally enable Approve and generate per item when you trust the batch.
4. Close quick review when the queue is clear.

Batch approve and generate

1. In Briefs view, filter by Needs review or Approved without content.
2. Select multiple rows if bulk actions are available on the current page.
3. Run Approve or Approve and generate from the bulk bar.
4. Alternatively, use Generate first drafts at calendar level for all eligible approved briefs on the focused strategy.
5. Monitor the Background draft generation panel for queued, in-progress, and failed items. Retry failures after fixing the underlying issue.

Expected result

• Approved briefs show brief status Approved.
• Generated items gain body content and move to editorial status Draft or In progress.
• The calendar next action column guides reviewers toward the editor.
• Skipped items in batch generation list a reason (for example missing brief, ineligible status, protected manual edit).

Tips

• Approve quality, not volume — Reject or remove weak AI proposals; regenerating a period is cheaper than rewriting bad drafts.
• Campaign briefs often land as Needs review — Expect a validation pass after campaign plan generation before drafts exist.
• Protected content — If someone already edited a draft manually, batch regeneration may skip the item to avoid overwriting human work.
• Two approvals — Brief Approved → generate draft → editorial Approved → CMS publish. Skipping the second approval triggers a warning when publishing.
• Focus strategy — Batch calendar generation runs on the focused strategy only; approve items on that strategy or switch focus first.

Next step

Generate Content From a Brief for details on generation modes, retries, and opening the editor.