Staying calm during a real-life emergency is easier said than done, but is critical when the safety of others is on the line. For staff who operate their school’s mobile safety app, sending clear and concise push notifications is crucial.
Push notifications are meant to inform students and staff about safety emergencies as they happen in order to provide important and accurate information. When the quality of the push notifications is in question during an emergency, users may not get the information they need or worse, get the wrong information. We’ve put together a quick list of what to do to ensure your pushes get the job done.
Preparation is Essential
Having a template ready for writing push notifications in an emergency will help you and your team be more prepared when a push needs to be sent in a limited amount of time. On some occasions, push notifications have been sent out during a real emergency but had links cut off or they were written in a disorganized manner.
A priority for anyone sending push notifications should be that any links in the message include all the characters to ensure that the link is fully functioning. As well, every team member must be aware of the information being sent out through pushes, in order to avoid sending out inaccurate information and to be able to best address the requests for information from students, faculty and staff.
Grace Under Pressure
It’s easy to become panicked during a real-life emergency, but this cannot be reflected in the push notifications that are sent. Staying calm is a must so that you or your team can inform students and staff with crucial information. Emergency training can better prepare staff for high pressure situations and ensure that push notifications are sent properly.
Refrain From Sending "Correction Pushes"
One of the reasons why sending clear, accurate pushes is so important is to avoid having to send correction pushes. Sending a series of correction push notifications will cause the push notifications and the safety app to be perceived as unreliable, as well as annoying to students. To avoid sending correction pushes, the obvious strategy is ensuring that the information is correct and delivered clearly. Correction pushes cause uninstalls, which is what you want to avoid.
Reap the Benefits
Once students see the speed and reliability of receiving push notifications, they are far more likely to download the app themselves in order to receive pushes, if they have not already done so. Having a dependable source of information is important for students, especially during an emergency situation. The more students who are aware of a present situation and of what actions to take, then the more students are able to keep themselves safe in the case of an emergency.
Do you have any other recommendations to add? What training do you provide for your team when you send pushes? Let us know what you think by commenting below!
