Every way a campaign visibly goes wrong, what it actually means, and the shortest path to a fix — in the order you should check them.
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Before anything else, read three things on the campaign page, in this order:
Those three answer most questions without further investigation. The phase badge in particular is doing more work than it looks like:
| Phase | It means | Your move |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled | Next generation is on the books, with a date | Nothing. Wait. |
| Generating | A run is in flight right now | Nothing. Wait. |
| Needs accounts | Armed with nowhere to publish | Connect or fix an account |
| Awaiting approval | Content exists, waiting on a person | Open the Approve queue |
| Posting | Content exists, window open | Nothing |
| Done | Window closed | Read the outcome |
| No badge | Draft or paused | Activate or resume it |
A campaign with no phase badge at all is a draft or is paused. That is the single most common "it isn't doing anything" — it was never armed.
Work down this list. Each step rules out the ones below it.
1. Is it active? Only active campaigns generate. A scheduled campaign whose window has not opened will not produce content — it must not produce content for a window you have not reached. A draft never dispatches at all.
2. Does it have a start date? A campaign with no start date owes no generation. It has nothing to count weeks from. This is legal — a campaign can be named before it is dated — but it will sit there indefinitely.
3. Does it have usable accounts? The phase says needs accounts when the campaign names no account, or none of the ones it names still holds a valid connection. Nothing can be generated or published in this state.
Fix the connection and the campaign proceeds. Adding a valid account to an active campaign re-arms it — you do not need to deactivate and reactivate.
4. Is your content-creator agent paused? A campaign runs through an agent. If your only content-creator agent is paused, the run refuses cleanly and names the agent. Resume it. Bolta deliberately will not hire a second agent around your pause.
5. Has the week already been generated? Bolta records which week it last produced. A second attempt at the same week finds the work done and stops. That is not a failure — check the timeline for the content it already made.
6. Has the window closed? Once the window closes, nothing more attaches. If you want more, duplicate.
7. Read the last error. If none of the above applies, the campaign will have recorded why. It carries when it happened, a plain message, which producer was involved and which week it was trying to produce. That message is the answer.
This is the most common shape of a disappointing campaign, and the reason is almost never technical.
Check the empty reason first. The campaign derives why it published nothing and reports the earliest provable blocker (Module 12). The top three, in the order they actually occur:
"Awaiting approval" — the modal answer. The drafts are fine. Nobody decided on them. Campaign content always waits for a person, on every autonomy setting, so this is not a misconfiguration and there is no switch that changes it. Open the queue.
"Nothing approved" — drafts were seen and none passed. Different from the above, and more interesting: somebody read them and said no. If that is one week, edit the drafts. If it is two weeks running, the angle or the context is wrong — see Lesson 4.
"Publishing failed" — the attempt was made and rejected. Usually a dead token. Reconnect the account. Platforms expire connections quietly and this is the failure that looks most like a Bolta bug and is least often one.
Then the less common ones:
A campaign can look like it published nothing when it published partially. That is guarded: publishing is counted from per-account records, so a post that went out on one account and failed on another counts as published on the one that worked. If you have a dead token on one platform, your campaign numbers are still honest about the others.
Not broken — wrong. Different problem, different fixes.
Almost always a context problem, not a prompt problem. Bolta writes more generally when it knows less, and it will not invent facts to fill the gap.
In order of leverage:
That is voice, not campaigns. Check which voice profile the campaign names — it may be inheriting a workspace default you have not looked at in months. Then work on the voice itself; the Voice DNA course covers it.
Read week one's drafts as a set, not individually. Signals you picked wrong:
The angle is a per-campaign choice, so switching is cheap. What is not cheap is running four weeks on the wrong one.
Check the picker. Formats Bolta cannot produce are shown greyed with the reason, and the mix drops keys it does not recognise. Stories and avatar videos are not produced at all; blog posts need a connected site; emails are written but never sent.
The mix is per week. Halve the mix, not the duration.