Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described. Generally, the described techniques provide for efficiently signaling configurations of physical resources and transmission parameters to a user equipment (UE) for small data transmissions (for example, data transmissions in an inactive or idle state). A base station may broadcast or multicast downlink control information (DCI) in one or more control channels that schedules data transmissions in a set of data channels. The base station may then multicast one or more configurations in each of the data channels, and a UE may decode one of the data channels to determine a configuration for a small data transmission. Because the configurations may be transmitted in the data channels in addition to system information or paging information, a base station may have access to sufficient resources to provide suitable configurations to a UE for communications in an inactive or idle state.