Feature Request: Notification Should Reflect Emergency Type, Not Emergency Roll Started

Who is this feature for?

Teachers, admins, students, school community, emergency response personnel

Platform

Mobile Phone, Desktop, Tablet, Browser Extension

What problem would this new feature help your school solve?

I wanted to pass along some feedback on how emergency alerts and emergency rolls work together in the platform. Right now, triggering an emergency alert automatically initiates an emergency roll, and the notifications display "Emergency Roll Started." For us, that's a problem. Not every emergency scenario should involve a roll or should even reference one in the notification. During a lockdown, for example, we don't want staff or students seeing roll-related messaging - they should be hiding, staying quiet, and keeping devices away entirely. A notification that says "Emergency Roll Started" works against that. What we'd like is for the notification to simply state the type of emergency - e.g. "Lockdown" - rather than referencing a roll. If a roll is needed for that particular emergency type, that instruction can live within the alert's body/instructions, so the person opens the notification, sees the emergency type, reads the instructions, and if a roll is required, clicks through to join it. But the headline notification shouldn't mention a roll. Other platforms we've used allow this to be configured per alert type, you decide at setup whether that specific alert should require a roll, or not. That flexibility matters because it lets us match the notification to the actual emergency (a fire emergency can reference a roll; a lockdown shouldn't). The same logic needs to apply to the All Clear. We need to be able to trigger an All-Clear alert on its own, without it being tied to a roll. Right now, the All-Clear process seems dependent on a roll having been started. We'd consider this a fairly essential capability for how we handle different emergency types, and I'd encourage you to look at adding it.

How often does this problem happen?

Unpredictable (e.g. Emergency)

Describe the impact on your school if this problem remains unsolved?

In a real lockdown, any notification referencing a roll risk prompting staff or students to check their phones, respond, or otherwise draw attention to their location at exactly the moment they should be silent, hidden, and device-free. That's a direct life-safety risk, not just a workflow inconvenience. It also puts us in a position where our internal lockdown procedures and training conflict with what the platform actually displays during a live event, which creates confusion for staff and could undermine confidence in the tool during the emergency it's most critical for. Until this is addressed, we either have to accept that risk or avoid using Orah's alerting for lockdown-type emergencies altogether, which defeats much of the value of having it as our emergency communication platform.

Please list any other tools or platforms that you know of that offer similar functionality.

Reach

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Upvoters

Status

Backlog

Board

General

Date

20 days ago

Author

Denijel Culjak

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