Campus Cloud includes tools to help your institution communicate with students in an emergency situation. For example, you may want to notify students of a building closure, or an inclement weather warning. Or, you may need to respond to an emergency situation.
There are steps you can take to be prepared for emergency preparedness:
- Make templates for emergency announcements
- Instruct students to turn on app notifications
- Designate a person to send an emergency notification
- Make sure instructions are readily available.
- Practice
Thinking about your plan in advance will help you respond effectively to an emergency situation.
1) Make templates for emergency announcements.
Be prepared by creating templates for announcements you may need in emergency situations. You can create many templates and save them. This saves you the time of composing your message when you need it.
We recommend you create templates for announcements you might need to send. For information, see Create an Announcement Template.
2) Instruct your students to turn on app notifications.
Students must have app notifications turned on to receive announcements. If students turn notifications off, they may not receive your emergency notification until they open the campus app. You want students to have notifications turned on, so they receive your emergency announcement as soon as you send it.
Share this FAQ with your students: Turn App Notifications On and communicate the importance of leaving app notifications turned on.
You may wish to repeat this message more than once throughout the school year.
3) Designate a person or persons to send an emergency notification.
Make sure everyone knows who will send a notification in an emergency situation. And, make sure that the person designated to send the message has the Campus Cloud permissions they need to access the template and send the message.
Choose a Campus Cloud user who will send the notification. Then grant them the "Emergency Announcements" permission. You can refer to this FAQ, Change Team Member Permissions, for instructions.
4) Make sure instructions are readily available.
Write out who will do what in an emergency situation, and make sure those instructions are shared and readily available.
You can share this FAQ -- Notify (Send an Announcement) -- with the person designated to send your emergency message. They can bookmark the page, or print it.
5) Practice.
You may wish to practice your emergency preparedness measures from end-to-end, including using Campus Cloud to send a test announcement to your students.
Ready Education, makers of Campus Cloud and your campus app, are here to help you. If you need assistance with the important task of emergency preparedness, please submit a request at Ready Education Help Center and we will be happy to assist.