Goal
This guide will demonstrate how to publish an alert for one or more of your communities.
Before you get started
You will need to have the correct permissions set in order to publish alerts. To check this, navigate to:
Settings ➡️ Admins ➡️ Edit your chosen admin ➡️ Select Roles & Permissions ➡️ Scroll down to Access Detail ➡️ Expand Communicate and ensure that Alerts has Full Access selected.
Publishing an alert
Step 1 - Let's begin
Login to the admin dashboard and select the Communicate feature from the menu. Then, select Alerts and finally click the + New Alert button in the top right
Please see this article for more on managing alerts on this page.
Step 2 - Details
Here is where you can enter in the alert heading and description, and optionally include details about the resolution.
Your alert heading is the first thing residents will see. Make it direct, short and attention grabbing. The description can elaborate further on the alert and answer questions which may come to mind. Finally, the optional resolution field is to set an expectation for when this alert will be resolved, but being a text field means you can further elaborate on any caveats.
When you have completed this page, click Next.
Step 3 - Community
Alerts can be targeted towards one or more communities. This can streamline your reactive communications to residents across a broad portfolio. This page has a single drop-down where you can select all communities or individual ones.
The alert will not be published in communities left unselected.
When you have completed this page, click Next.
Step 4 - Audience
By default, your alert will be sent to everyone within the selected communities. However, this can be fine-tuned based on your present needs. For example, you may only want to alert committee members, or owners, or one or more clubs. You can also select individual members if necessary.
Clicking the drop-down list will show the options available, and you can make one or more selections (yes, this supports a combination).
When you have completed this page, click Next.
Step 5 - Visibility
This page is a very simply toggle which controls whether this alert will be visible on the mobile app or not. By default, it will show on the mobile app.
Example needed for why not to show an alert on the mobile app
When you have completed this page, click Next.
Step 6 - Notifications
There are three methods of notifying your targeted community and filtered audience:
SMS (will incur costs)
Email (on by default)
Push notification (on by default)
You can opt for which method, or methods, to use by toggling the options on or off. Email is perhaps the most reliable and cost-effective method.
Push notifications are a fantastically modern method; however, they depend on individual device settings. A user may have turned off their device push notifications or changed how the notification is delivered (impacting how they see it) which ultimately impacts your ability to communicate.
There is no way for you to enable someone's device push notifications.
When you have completed this page, click Next.
Step 7 - Expiration
The final step is to select when the alert will expire. This is a great way to ensure that alerts do resolve "automatically" after a given amount of time.
The obvious question here is, when do I set the expiry for when I do not always know when the resolution will occur? Best practice is to set this for worst case scenarios. You can always archive/delete an alert manually before the expiration date is reached or edit it to change this.
When you have completed this page, click Send Alert.
You will receive a preview of the alert
Heading
Description
Resolution details (if included)
Selected notification methods
If you are happy with this, click Submit. Otherwise, you can click Cancel and use the Previous button to go back and amend the details on the relevant page.
Conclusion
Your alert will be published immediately, and notifications will be sent. If you opted to show this alert on the mobile app it will now be visible to residents.
You will be taken back to the alert dashboard and will see your alert in the list.
If the alert has been resolved before the expiry you can select the ellipsis and click archive. If the alert was made in error, you can click delete.
Training video
This video shows how to send any type of communication