Notify a room's members in-app and external contacts by SMS at once, ask how they are, and track who has answered against a deadline. Includes the response link, updates with read receipts, all-clear and re-ping.
An emergency alert reaches everyone at once. It notifies a room's members in the app — a banner, a push notification and an alert tone — and, if you choose, texts external contacts on a recipient list at the same moment. Then it tracks who has answered and what they said, so you can see at a glance who's safe, who's evacuating, and who is still silent.
Most alerts are fired by Declare Emergency — one tap on a scenario tile alarms every room that scenario covers. To alert a single room, or to alert from an incident that's already running, use Activate alert on the incident's Alarms tab:
The type sets the icon, tone and urgency members see — for example fire, medical, evacuation, lockdown, intruder, hazmat, severe weather, security or a generic alert. A test type lets you exercise the flow without it counting against compliance.
Everyone alerted is asked how they are, and there are four answers — not two. A building evacuation where almost everyone is walking out shouldn't bury the handful of people who are actually trapped, which is exactly what a safe / not safe binary does.
Members answer in the app with a tap. External contacts tap the response link in their text (below), or reply to the message itself if they can't open a page. Anyone who hasn't answered at all is shown as no reply — which is a finding in its own right, not an absence, and is treated as one throughout the dashboard.
Every alert text can carry a short, personal link — whoot.me/r/… — that opens a branded page where the recipient answers, shares a precise location and answers your own questions in one submission, with no login and no app. It replaces the three-text back-and-forth that triage used to need.
The alert shows a live tally — "14 / 20 acknowledged · 2 breached" — against an acknowledgement deadline, so you can see immediately who hasn't responded in time. The Accountability tab breaks that down person by person, and the Map tab puts the same people on real mapping.
An update can go out over two channels, and you pick either or both. Page delivers it to everyone holding their response page open: free, no length limit, and read-receipted per person — a number SMS simply cannot give you. SMS reaches everyone regardless of whether their page is open, and costs segments as usual.
Someone who signs up to a targeted recipient list while an alert is running — scanning a QR poster during an evacuation, say — is enrolled and texted the original alert within seconds. That's the point: a person who arrives late still needs to know.
Large additions are held instead. If an unusual number of people join a targeted list at once — an admin importing four thousand numbers, or picking the wrong list — the incident shows a prompt with the current count and asks you to approve it. Thousands of emergency texts cannot be recalled. The threshold, and the whole behaviour, are set in Settings → General.