Rave Alert: Organizational Best Practices and Naming Conventions Center/ERMS/Rave... · 2019-11-16 · time, and to use your organization’s existing abbreviations and codes for

Rave Alert: Organizational Best Practices and Naming Conventions Updated November 16, 2019

RAVE ALERT BEST PRACTICES • UPDATED NOVEMBER 16, 2019 © 2019 RAVE MOBILE SAFETY. • PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL • 2

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 3

Alert Best Practices: Organize Usage, Waste No Opportunity ................................................. 3

Naming Conventions .................................................................................................................. 4 2.1 Overview ....................................................................................................................... 4

2.2 Naming Conventions: Alert Templates .......................................................................... 4

1.1 Naming Conventions: Roles .......................................................................................... 7

1.2 Naming Conventions: Delivery Lists for Recipient Groups ........................................... 9

1.3 Naming Conventions: Email and Voice Profiles .......................................................... 10

1.4 Naming Conventions: Usage ...................................................................................... 13

Other Best Practices ................................................................................................................ 15 2.1 Training Mode ............................................................................................................. 15

2.2 Template Protection .................................................................................................... 16

2.3 Follow Up Alerting ....................................................................................................... 16

2.4 Rave Guardian Mobile App Activation ............................................................................. 18

2.5 Smart911 Mobile App Activation ...................................................................................... 18

2.6 Rave Panic Button and CAP Activation ........................................................................... 19

2.7 Support, Documentation, and Training Options ............................................................... 20

2.7 General Tips ..................................................................................................................... 22

Identifying Your Organization .............................................................................................. 22

Last Tip: Engaging with Rave Mobile Safety’s Customer Success team ............................ 23


Introduction This document compiles best practices in use across a wide range of Rave Mobile Safety customers, examining the features that Rave Mobile Safety has seen to best organize and optimize use of Rave products.

The document contains 3 sections:

1. General notification best practices 2. Naming conventions that make the system easier to manage 3. Tips and tutorials illustrating best practice usage

We understand that everyone’s needs are different, and that safety policies, procedures, and tactics are unique to every organization. In general, our goal is to offer suggestions that you can fine tune to best meet the practical, everyday needs of your notification and communication needs.

Rave’s Customer Success team organizes both our annual Rave Summit conference events, as well as many regional user groups in different areas of the country on a regular basis. Watch your email for announcements and invitations for events near you, or visit https://www.ravemobilesafety.com/events to see our latest offerings.

1.1 Alert Best Practices: Organize Usage, Waste No Opportunity When you test the system, a common practice, take advantage of opportunity to include useful content describing your offerings, opt-in choices, safety procedures and other relevant preparedness content as appropriate.

• Many organizations work together across functional areas, coordinating safety response and communications with various stakeholders. Cross functional planning might include:

• Develop clear system usage guidelines and activation processes • Involve Human Resources to be clear on staff usage with respect to BYOD and other

organizational and privacy policies • Provide clear FAQ to users describing your offerings, options, and expectations • Identify your organization’s high risk scenarios (e.g., active shooter, weather

notifications, closures) and create templates to support them • Create and review prepared language that works under duress and socialize these as

standards in your template • Build templates focused on your current processes and procedures • Explore templates for multi-phase or tiered activation scenarios • Initial urgent message notifications • Updates – Involve PIOs to guide communications standards • All Clear • Tip: Use the Alert Tags feature to collect these multiple messages for later analysis


Naming Conventions

2.1 Overview Consistent naming conventions improve Rave Alert usability, especially in the following contexts:

• Alert templates • List names • Roles • Email and Voice Profiles • Facebook and Twitter Profiles • RSS, CAP and IPAWS-OPEN channels • Stored Shapes

Try to make names obvious for manageability: to add, change and remove administrators over time, and to use your organization’s existing abbreviations and codes for better ease of use and comprehension.

2.2 Naming Conventions: Alert Templates Consider sort order when naming templates to prioritize emergency messages and ensure that they appear at the top of the page. For example:

• 00 – Active Shooter • 01 – Assailant Warning • 02 – Facility Closure...etc.

Common types of templates include the following, though Rave suggests customizing them for your needs:

• Advisory • All Clear • Closure • Callout / Operational

Notifications • Drill

• Evacuation • Fire • Lockdown • Power Outage • Test • Weather

Pro Tip: Use a code for temporary or test templates to sort them to the bottom of the list, such “ZZ – Training Template.”

#


Try to use your organization’s acronyms and recognizable codes as prefixes when appropriate. Examples of common abbreviations are the following:

• OEM • EOC • FAC • DHS • HR • WEATHER • SEC

• OrgPD • EWR • PD • SRT • IPAWS • IT

And other names or codes that are taken for granted among your staff – department codes, event types, ESFs, jurisdiction, location among multiple locations using the system.

Figure 1: In this illustration, templates are targeted for Human Resources and IT departments.

When practical, it makes sense to use similar conventions across template names, list names, and role names. For example, when a new staff member joins your facilities department, a role for that department might begin with FAC, e.g., “FAC Administrator”, have a set of templates identified as FAC, e.g., “FAC Building Closure”, “FAC Hazard Warning”, etc., and list names such as “FAC Responders List”. One last tip is to consider events in your risk portfolio that are typically communicated in a series. For example, if you plan for active assailant situations, group like templates that provide the initial message, follow on updates, and All Clear messaging. The content of these template will likely be tweaked by safety staff and PIOs, but a well considered starting point will save time during critical events.


Also, using the tags feature on your templates to organize reporting across multiple messages tied to a single event. These may be general, (e.g., “00 - Active Assailant Urgent”, “01 – Active Assailant Update”, “02 – All Clear”), or more specific and added during sending operations.


1.1 Naming Conventions: Roles Rave Alert supports default roles but also allows you to fully customize your role names.

Recommendations:

• Minimize the number of Domain Administrators. This is the superuser role with unconstrained permissions. Follow the principle of least privilege (PoLP).

• Consider creating custom roles instead of using the sample roles provided as defaults:

a. The Broadcast Admin role hides feature areas by showing the admin only the Alerts and Reports tab, but allows NO restrictions on access to templates, lists, profiles, and others. This user will have extensive permissions in your alert system.

b. List Admin is a typical starter role for any alert sender who is not responsible for administering the system. It constrains the user to the Alert and Report tab areas of the product, and allows specific assignments of templates, lists, and other permission-based functions in the system. But – even if your own roles are very similar to this default, consider creating and naming your own roles for more customized, appropriate naming for your organization.

Properly naming custom roles helps everyone understand the type of user and permissions in a way that is instantly intelligible to most people in your organization. Create custom roles with names that improve the manageability of your role assignments. Over time, staffing and usage policy changes that you implement often mean that you are likely to revisit management features after a long period of time – e.g., when a new staff member joins your organization and needs access to the system.

One goal of these naming conventions is to ensure that when you do need to apply roles and permissions to new administrators, your role and template names will make it a simple matter to

Figure 2: Once your tags have been added, you can use the "Filter" function under Reports to collect the reports related to a specific incident or category tag.


assign to new users. Since roles have been enhanced to include both role definitions and a set of default objects specific to each role (templates, lists, stored shapes, social media accounts and more), one goal is to make role names self-documenting . Consider these suggestions from among the following characteristics:

• Functional / Department grouping: Organizational departments and authority names. For example:

• Dispatcher • Emergency Management • Security • Public Safety • Police/Fire/EMS • Facilities Administration • Medical School • PIO, PR, Communications Staff • Executive Staff

• Location: Specific campus, building or other key office locations, such as the following:

• City of Rave Courthouse Administration • North Area Administration • Satellite Site Administration • London Headquarters

• Categories based on enabled features or functions specific to administrator groups.

Examples might include the following:

• Standard Administrator – An alert sender with widespread system permissions • SnapSend Author – An admin account that shows ONLY the SnapSend and

Reports tabs for activation via a simple interface • Help Desk Administrator – User with read-only or read-write access to People

data in the system, but restricted in other permissions • IT Administrator – User with access to System and SmartLoader configuration

areas, but who does not need to activate alerts • Guardian Administrator – User who can configure the features of the Rave

Guardian mobile app. • Guardian Command View Monitor – Responders with access to the Rave

Command View console application, but who should not access the Guardian configuration features typically reserved for higher permissioned administrators

• You might also consider roles that combine functions, location and other organization-specific categories to meet your organization’s needs. Some examples of this type of role are the following:


• North Area SnapSend Author • OEM Standard Administrator • Security Team Manager, matched to a Security Team Author role that restricts

access to configurations • Public Safety Administrator • Facilities PIO

1.2 Naming Conventions: Delivery Lists for Recipient Groups Alert recipients come from multiple sources – all methods add them to Lists. Lists are simply groups of recipients targeted to receive your messages by any number of means. Sources include:

• “Logical” Data – Based on manual affiliations, internal group designations, Managed Contacts, SmartLoader data imports, or other data associated with the user (e.g., departments, roles)

• Opt-Ins – User selects optional categories of messages to receive, e.g. on the subscriber portal “Opt-In Lists” page

• SMS Opt-Ins – Add-on to standard opt-in lists that allows for “public” or “private staff” sign-ups by texting a keyword to a Rave number

i. SMS Opt-In subscriptions can be indefinite, set for a duration of days, or set to expire upon a specific date. A wide range of uses include support for temporary or ad hoc registrations during events, visitor messaging, and more.

• Geographical Filters – based on: • Map-based selections that filter certain lists based on address • Location-based targeting (e.g., of mobile app users)

Figure 3:SMS Opt-In feature is an optional extension to standard Opt-In Lists.


• Queries against Rave Prepare information provided by public subscribers when available

• Addresses tied to Loaded Landline data sources, such as ANI/ALI 911 data or GIS systems

In Rave Alert, you can make multiple selections of delivery lists to reach the right people – and the product will de-duplicate any overlapping data. Thus your strategy for selections should be one of “inclusion”. Multiple list memberships are not an issue given that the system manages duplicates down to the individual contact level.

1.3 Naming Conventions: Email and Voice Profiles If you’re unfamiliar with how Rave Alert uses the idea of Profiles for email and voice alerts, review the profile features in documentation and training videos.

The short version is that email and voice profiles act comparably to “presets” – they store settings that get applied to your messages via a single click. Profiles are unlimited in usage, and can be assigned to specific administrators so that they see only the profiles that matter to their daily usage of the system.

Email Profiles allow you to set branding elements, Display Name, Reply-To: and From: addresses with email. This makes your emails identifiable to the user, and the Reply-To: field allows you to control where email replies will be sent. (Any address ending with @getrave.com defaults is sent to a “no-reply” mailbox.)=

List Permissions – Who gets my messages? When you assign lists to an alert sender, you are essentially deciding the question of who a given administrator is allowed to send messages. The primary use cases for List permissions center around determining access to recipients based on your rules.

For assistance configuring permissions, please review the Role-Based Access Controls Admin Guide under the Help link in the product.

If you are exploring using SmartLoader features to populate lists via automation, please review the ListLoader Overview document under Help.


Figure 4: Email Profiles are defined in the System area under Alert Settings / Email.

Rave suggests renaming the Display Name field in Email profiles. This value will appear as the “sender name” in each recipient’s mail client, and will often influence the extent to which readers engage with the message:

Profiles are selected during template creation or during an ad hoc message send:


Voice Profiles behave similarly to email settings: the profile sets values for CallerID, number of times to annunciate the message during the call, number of times to retry busy or unanswered phones, and whether to use the “Introductory Voice” feature that

Note on Email Profiles Email Profiles in Rave Alert should be set to “HTML” mode if you wish to include standard header and footer content, images, and/or file attachments in your messages. Please consult the HTML Email User Guide, available on the Help screen, for full details on how to use email profile functionality.

Figure 7: Voice Profile configuration under System / Alert Settings / Voice.

Figure 6: Message preview will show you the formatting and details applied to your alert message when a given Email Profile is selected.

Figure 5: When creating or editing an email message under Step 2, the user can select any profiles available within their access permissions.


can pre-pend a friendly recorded greeting to your voice notification, e.g., “Please stay tuned for an important staff notification from [your organization].”

1.4 Naming Conventions: Usage Try to name integrations via RSS, Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and social media by their purpose. Examples include the following:

• Website Updates • Visix™ Digital Signage • Police Department Twitter Account • IPAWS Lab Test Environment • Novanex™ Scrolling Signage System

Name other profiles and shapes in ways that are appropriate to your usage. For example:

• Executive Team Mail Branding • General Announcement • HR Department Staff Communications • [insert name] Compliance Profile (e.g., this might include required disclaimer content to

appear in the footers of your message)

When using Stored Shapes, consider using common location identifiers that will be immediately recognizable, such as the following:


• Headquarters • Smedley Research Lab • Orlando Offices

Ultimately, Rave Alert is your organization’s communications tool. Try to select names that are most meaningful to you and your organization to ensure that your users can derive an intuitive understanding of system elements when sending and receiving alerts.

Document your naming conventions and try to stick to them to keep things clear and obvious to your alert activators. You may wish to use permissions to manage which users in your system are permitted to overwrite alert templates, and which users should send their messages, but not be able to overwrite the underlying template.


Other Best Practices

2.1 Training Mode Rave Alert supports a Training Mode option that allows administrators to use all functionality permitted to their role, but will prevent sending of any type of message. The dropdown menu at the top right of the screen includes the “Enter Training Mode” option.

This can be valuable especially for new trainees on the product; they can see the “actual” product they will use without risk of accidental activation. But if an admin is in the product building templates or lists, for example, with no intention of sending a message – Training Mode can act as an additional assurance to prevent accidents.

Figure 8: At the final confirmation screen in Training Mode, the "Send This Alert" button is greyed out.


2.2 Template Protection When you create a template that requires the sender to enter information specific to the alert, Rave Alert has a feature that can be very helpful: Template Protection.

Template protection is a simple feature and easy to include in your alert templates: just add the exact string - [INSERT - to any message. (What follows is optional, but the word INSERT must be capitalized and preceded by the open bracket character [, e.g., [INSERT details], [INSERT Building Name], etc. The closing bracket or any words that follow [INSERT are completely optional.

If a sender does not replace that string and attempts to move forward without completing the message, they will receive an additional warning:

2.3 Follow Up Alerting Follow Up Alerts allows you to send an additional message to recipients of your initial alert. When you use a Polling notification, you can for example select just users who provide a

Figure 10: As an example, a staff availability poll has provided a set of volunteers to cover a shift. The Follow Up alert can be used to provide additional details to your staff volunteers.

Figure 9: If you see this dialog, you have likely missed updating a template. Choose GO BACK AND EDIT to review and change updates you may have missed.


specific response. After you choose “Calculate Delivery Targets”, a temporary recipient list is created and applied either to an existing template, or as a “pre-completed” Step 3 in the Standard alert type.

Consider using Polling alerts and possible use cases to cover scenarios such as Check-In, Reunification, or staffing use cases via the quota capability (i.e., to close the poll when a certain


number of a specific response is collected). See the Polling Alerts User Guide under Help for further information.

2.4 Rave Guardian Mobile App Activation When you target a message to your organization’s users of Rave Guardian, or in the case of public agencies to users of the mySmart911 mobile app, you have a matrix of options for targeting mobile app users within your organization. Mobile users can be targeted for notifications by list name or as individuals, and when a geographic filter is added under Step 3, Filters, Geography, recipients are filtered based on real-time location. In other words, with a Geo-Filter added, any users with Rave Guardian will be queried for location within your shape.

User Selection No Geo-Filter Enabled

Geo-Filter Active

“All Guardian Users” List, Everyone List, All Internal Users, etc.

All domain Guardian users selected

All domain Guardian users in shape selected

Individual Users or members of standard lists (other than All Guardian Users)

Individuals with Guardian app delivery mode selected

Individual users with Guardian AND within shape are selected

2.5 Smart911 Mobile App Activation The Smart911 mobile app, available on the iOS App Store and Google Play, is the public mobile recipient app for your community. Unlike Rave Guardian or Rave Panic Button, it is intended for public alerting from government agencies and jurisdictions only. Members of the public with the app can manage their profiles, alert account settings and category preferences.

When you target a message to the Smart911 mobile app, you are declaring your notification “public” – and it will be available to anyone with the Smart911 app. Mobile users can see notifications by clicking on a map view, and when a geographic filter is added under Step 3, Filters, Geography, recipients are targeted based on real-time location. With a Geo-Filter added, anyone with the mobile Smart911 app within that region will also receive a push notification from your alert.


User Selection No Geo-Filter Enabled Geo-Filter Active

Everyone List, All Opt-in Recipents with Smart911 app content provided

All Smart911users subscribed to your alerts, users who browse alerts in app

All Smart911 app users nationally currently found within your shape

2.6 Rave Panic Button and CAP Activation The Rave Panic Button today uses its own distribution groups and specific messaging features, independent of your Rave Alert system. However, the Rave Panic Button does support the ability to send a Rave Alert when an activation is enacted in the app, using Common Alerting Protocol, or CAP for short. CAP is a vendor-to-vendor standard for interoperable notifications – in other words, CAP allows your Rave Alert system to activate other notification tools (“CAP Outbound” or CAP Producer) and conversely, allow other systems such as the Panic Button to activate Rave Alert (“CAP Inbound” or CAP Consumer).

CAP support allows you to extend the behavior of Panic Button notifications to trigger Rave Alert (or any other CAP-compliant system), so that your activations using Panic Button may also trigger an alert to go out by any of the delivery methods configured in your Rave Alert instance,

Figure 11: CAP interface in the Rave Panic Button configuration area found at RaveFacility.com.


to any audience defined in your Rave Alert lists. If you’ve been asked to provide additional communications when your staff uses the Panic Button or Staff Assist, Panic Button and Rave Alert can extend the effectiveness of the solution. Documentation is available within the Rave Panic Button configuration area.

2.7 Support, Documentation, and Training Options Rave Mobile Safety provides a wide range of resources to support you. These include:

www.ravecustomer.com – Rave Customer Support portal. Access to all Rave support resources

www.raveacademy.com – Sign up for Rave’s 24x7 online courseware

Product Documentation is available via the Help link on every page

Figure 12: Choose the HELP option to view support information, documentation links, tutorials, and much more.


Figure 13: The Product Support area is organized by product. Note that you may also be able to review your support ticket history on this page.


2.7 General Tips

IdentifyingYourOrganization• Your messages arrive in a communications-

saturated context

• Rave Alert features that help:

– Introductory Text for SMS messages

– Email Profiles to label emails properly

– Voice profiles to customize CallerID

• Remember that different mobile clients may format messages differently – aim for most compatible

• Rave Alert features that help:

– Introductory Text for SMS messages

– Email Profiles to label emails properly

– Voice profiles to customize CallerID

• Inbound voice option for “call in”

– Social media public communications to reinforce messaging


LastTip:EngagingwithRaveMobileSafety’sCustomerSuccessteamRave's Customer Success team is charged with periodic Executive Business Reviews (EBRs), as well as to check in with customers to gather feedback, review, troubleshoot and escalate issues when needed, to suggest new features and best practices to our product and support teams, and to act as a conduit to all your interaction with Rave Mobile Safety.

The Customer Success team also supports our annual user conference, the Rave Summit, typically in the Spring in a major city. More information about the Rave Summit can be found at www.ravesummit.com.

In addition to our annual conference, Rave Mobile Safety also supports regional user group meetings around the US, where customers can network, share ideas and best practices with peers and peer organizations, attend training sessions, interact with key Rave staff, provide direct product feedback, hear keynote addresses, participate in panel discussions and more. Keep an eye out for announcements of these sessions.

Finally, Rave distributes official Release Notes in advance of updates and product enhancements. These are sent to all Domain Administrators as well as any staff requested to receive them via a standard request to [email protected].

Documents

Rave Alert: Organizational Best Practices and Naming Conventions Center/ERMS/Rave... · 2019-11-16 · time, and to use your organization’s existing abbreviations and codes for