Emergency Alert Notifications Guide

The Emergency Alert Notifications module allows you to create an alert that will visible on all pages of your Presence site(s). This enables you to quickly and easily convey vital information to your users. Users that have been authorized to do so can create these alerts from within Presence or Communicate.

Who Should Use this Guide

This guide is written to be accessible to users of all technical backgrounds and it is intended for administrators who may need to send alerts.

Authorizing Users to Send Alerts

Because alerts can be pushed out to all of your sites, only users that are administrators at the district site as well as any school sites can be assigned the ability to create alerts. If the user is not an administrator or is only an administrator for some of the sites, their account will need to be added to the Administrators group on all of your Presence sites.

Note: If you are using an external source to manage your user accounts, like SIS, Google SSO, or LDAP, we recommend that you use the mappings associated with that source to add the alert users to the appropriate Administrators groups.

Ensuring User has Proper Group Membership

If you are an administrator, you can check a user’s membership by going to Manage Users on the district site.

1. Click the user you want to check and then go to the Member Of tab.

2. Ensure that the user is a member of the Administrators group.

3. If your site has child sites (like, it is a district site with school sites) you should see an External Groups section. The user must be part of the Administrators group for each school site as well.

Adding User to the Emergency Alerts Role

1. Go to the System Administration page.

2. Under General Administration section, click Server Settings.

3. Click on the Roles tab.

4. Click the Roles dropdown and choose EmergencyAlertsAuthors.

5. Click Add Members.

6. In the User Picker window, find the user(s) you wish to authorize and click Add.

7. Once you have added all the users you wish to include in the role, click OK.

Confirming User Account is Able to Create Alerts

1. On the System Administration page, under the General Administration section, click Manage Authorization of Roles.

2. Set the Roles dropdown to EmergencyAlertAuthors.

3. On this page you will see users that are authorized to send alerts. A user will appear on this page if their account is an administrator on the site as well as any child or school sites. If they have been added to the EmergencyAlertAuthors, or any other role, they will have a generated key listed for their account.

4. Please confirm that the user(s) that you added to the EmergencyAlertAuthors role are listed and that a key has been generated for their account.

5. If you do not see the user(s) you added to the role listed, then please go back to the Ensuring User has Proper Group Membership section and double-check that the user(s) have been added to the Administrators group for the current site and all of your child sites.

6. If you do not see any users listed in this section at all, it may be that a configuration change is needed in how your site handles user accounts in relation to child sites. Please contact our support team for assistance.

Note: If you click Generate for a user that is listed but does not have a key, this will automatically add the user to the EmergencyAlertAuthors role as well as generate a key. Similarly, if the user does have a key but is not part of the EmergencyAlertAuthors role, clicking Re-Generate will generate a new key and add the user to the EmergencyAlertAuthors role.

Enabling Posting to Presence for User Profiles in Communicate

In order to authorize a user to send alerts from Communicate, you will need to be an Administrator for both Presence and Communicate.

1. First log in to your Presence site and navigate to the System Administration page. If you have multiple sites, you will need to log in to your district site.

2. On the System Administration page, under the General Administration section, click Manage Authorization of Roles.

3. On the Roles dropdown, choose EmergencyAlertAuthors.

4. On this page you will see users that are authorized to send alerts. For more information on this process see the Authorizing Users to Send Alerts section.

5. You will need the secret key for your account. Click the copy icon to the right of the user to copy the key to your clipboard.

6. Log into your Communicate account.

7. Click the Admin tab and then the Profiles subtab.

8. Click the Edit button to the right of the profile(s) that will be posting emergency alerts to Presence.

9. Under Messaging Options, check the box for Post to Presence to enable the ability to send alerts to Presence.

Note: A configuration change for your account may be required. Please contact support if you don’t see the option to Post to Presence.

Users with a Presence-enabled profile will now have a field in their User settings for a Presence Secret Key.

Adding Key to Communicate

1. Click the Admin tab and then the Users subtab.

2. Click the Edit button to the right of the authorized user.

3. Under Post Options, enter the user’s Presence Secret Key in the field provided. This is the value you copied from the Manage Authorization of Roles section in Presence.

4. Click Done to add the key.

The user will now be able to send emergency alerts to Presence from Communicate.

Creating an Emergency Alert

Publishing an Alert from Communicate

Publishing an alert to Presence when creating a Broadcast is as simple as including any other destination type.

1. From the Communicate Dashboard, click the New Broadcast button.

2. During the Message Content step, click Posts and click Presence Website Alerts.

3. Specify the Start Date and End Date for the message.

4. Enter the Title and Message for your alert.

5. Choose the Presence website(s) where you want the alert to appear.

6. Click Save and continue adding content for the other destinations you wish to include.

Note: Selecting an end date is optional. If you don’t provide an end date, the scheduled alert will never expire. The alert will remain indefinitely on the selected Presence site(s) until an authorized Presence administrator manually removes the alert.

Send your broadcast as usual. When you do so, the alert will then appear on the selected Presence site(s).

Publishing an Alert from Presence

1. To create an emergency alert in Presence, log in to the Presence site as one of the authorized users.

2. Hover over the icon and click the Create Alert shortcut.

3. Fill out the Title and Body for your alert.

4. The Body field includes a simple rich text editor. Within the editor you can use the options in the Rich Text Editor Features table.

5. Click in the Expiry field to set the date and time when the alert should stop appearing.

6. If you have multiple sites, within the Site Selection section, you are able to choose which site(s) the alerts should appear on. By default, all schools will be selected, but you can adjust that selection as needed by checking or unchecking the boxes and using the Select All and Deselect All options.

7. Once you are ready to create the alert, click Post.

The alert will now be displayed to any users that visit the site (or any child sites) between now and the expiry date you have set.

Rich Text Editor Features

Rich Text Editor Tools

Inserting Hyperlinks

1. When you click the hyperlink icon, it will bring up the UI for inserting a hyperlink.

2. Fill in the Web Address for your link. If this is for a file or page on your site, you can use a relative URL (for example, /UserFiles/Servers/Server_196388/File/Example/schedule.pdf). If the link is for content outside of your site, use the absolute URL (for example, https://www.thisisanexamplesite.edu/schedule).

3. Fill in a Title for the link.

4. If you wish, you can also choose to Open link in new window.

Once you have finished configuring your hyperlink, click Insert.

Editing HTML

1. When you click the HTML icon, it will bring up the HTML for the Body content.

2. Make any edits to the HTML for the alert and click Update.

Note: There are limitations to the HTML you can add to an alert. To view the list of HTML you are able to use, click View Permitted HTML.

Removing an Alert

Normally the Emergency Alerts will be visible in Presence from when you first post them until the expiry date and time you have set. However, in some cases you may wish to remove an alert early (for example, if the information presented is no longer relevant or becomes out of date).

1. To remove an alert, log in to your Presence site.

2. Go to the System Administration page and, under the External Broadcast Settings, click Manage Emergency Alerts.

3. If you wish to remove an alert, click the cross icon to the right of the alert you wish to remove.

Viewing Alerts

1. If there are any active emergency notifications set, then when you first navigate to any of your Presence sites a modal will appear to display the notification(s).

2. If this is the first time you are viewing the alert, it will also have a New icon to the left of the alert’s title.

3. Once you have viewed the alert, you can click the

4. icon in the top right of the alert window. The alerts will now be minimized to the bottom right corner of the page.

5. If you click on the minimized alert icon, the alerts will be displayed again.

The alerts will stay minimized while you navigate around the site and won’t open again until you leave the site and return (or visit the site from a new browser or tab).