Groups, Geofences, and Dynamic Broadcasts

Broadcast Messages keep your community informed with safety notifications and alerts in everyday or urgent scenarios.  LiveSafe offers several tools that help you speak directly to the right members of your community.

Think about the intended audience to determine which tool to use:

• Groups: delivers Broadcasts to a specific set of users, and can be sent via text message, email, or push notification.  Example: if an individual's office or dorm is impacted by outages, they care about that even if they are away from the building.
• Geofences: delivers Broadcasts only to individuals in a specific location, with the app downloaded and location services enabled.  Example: specific street closed for construction.
• Dynamic Broadcasts: limits Geofence Broadcasts to a specific time window.  Example: short-term closure of a parking lot.

Sending Broadcasts to Groups

Groups can be created manually or through your Active Directory.  Selecting a group sends a Broadcast Message to everyone within that group who has the selected communications method.  If you select all three communications methods (SMS, email, and push notification), the message will be sent to everyone in the group.

Sending Broadcasts to Geofences

Dashboard Administrators with the “Add/Edit Standard Geofences” privilege can create new geofences and edit existing ones. When creating the boundary for a geofence, we recommend expanding boundaries by at least 100 meters (at least half a city block). Adding this buffer maximizes the probability that your users will receive location-based messages. Geofences are also helpful for marking “no-go “ areas or areas of continued concern, such as construction sites or road closures.

Sending Dynamic Broadcasts

When events are projected to last for a known number of days, dynamic broadcasts allows a geofenced message to remain “active” for a period of time.  An initial message is sent to users located within the specified geofence. And each time they cross the boundary of a new geofence, they will receive a notification.