Staff notifications are part of any organization’s activities. However, communicating with the right people, over the right channel, at the right time can be difficult. Manual messaging means that things can get missed, or worse, time-sensitive notifications are not received when intended. Furthermore, a mass messaging system could potentially cause security problems when sending emergency alerts.
The simplified staff notification solution serves to eliminate these issues. By making use of a suite of interconnected tools, it’s able to resolve each of these challenges from a single place.
With an automated solution that makes use of quick alerts and a responsive dashboard that allows you to track and activate different notifications with a single click, staff notification can be much easier. Different situations can have a series of notifications, and a task list to ensure that the notifications are sent at the right time.
This solution also includes a dynamic way to display responses in case there are staff who need to provide input or check in during an emergency. All of this can be templated, to make sure that the exact intended message is sent to the intended group.
If this sounds overwhelming, don’t worry. Here’s an example to make it more relatable:
ABC University has several departments, each with more than a dozen staff members. They need to share notifications with the staff about meetings, closures, emergencies, or even changes of policy. For security reasons, they also need to be able to ensure that notices intended for a single department aren’t accidentally leaked, or that messages don’t go to students and cause a panic in an emergency.
They could do this by manually choosing the addresses they send to, but it’s not an easy task to sift through recipients and verify the addresses by hand. I’ve gotten emails from companies I’ve never worked for because of this. What’s worse, a manual process also means that someone, somewhere has to manually keep a list updated and maintained and know who is working in each department. If there has been recent turnover, that can mean former staff receiving updates they should not be.
Instead, they could use an automated solution where they simply need to fill out virtual forms when someone joins or leaves a department, collecting all the relevant details at once for new hires, or deleting the entries for people leaving. Such a solution allows them to set rules on what gets shown to everyone who receives notifications and allows for those notifications to be sent using personal details like staff member names or departments.
Without a doubt, this automated option saves time, paper, and makes the overall process more efficient and easier to update. This solution is even located in one central platform so universities don’t need to sort through layers of paperwork or use multiple online tools.
How to Set Up a Simplified Staff Notification Solution
The most critical step of setting up an automated staff notification solution is having a strategy. Once that’s done, you have to go about discerning the set of tasks needed to build the process, and finally, finding the right digital tools to build the perfect staff notification solution. It isn’t easy since it involves substantial technical labor and knowledge.
Fortunately, universities do not have to build this solution from scratch.
SimplyCast anticipated the growing need for a staff notification solution and built a ready-to-go system that can be customized for every university.
All you need to do is to follow these basic steps to get your staff notification solution ready:
Step 1: Build the Staff Database
The core of this process is your staff database. Spreadsheet-based or physical databases can be a challenge to share and are even more of a challenge to update as staff rosters grow. A central, digitized database will allow notifications to be sent out, personalized, and contain pertinent information on a department-by-department basis.
Step 2: Template Your Messages
A lot of notifications can be built in advance and in an automated system, should be built in advance. This is because templates allow the alerts to be triggered with a single click, rather than having to construct the message before you send it. While this won’t always be possible, in many cases it is. Templating messages will save a lot of time and effort, which is important during emergencies or time-critical windows.
Step 3: Activate the Alert
Your messages are templated, your staff database maintained, and now it’s time to activate the alert. You just need to navigate to your notification dashboard and click a single button. This might have to be repeated a couple times if there are different departments that need notifying, however in the case of a critical, staff-wide notification, or a single department notification, only one click is required. The message will be personalized automatically and sent to each recipient.
Step 4: Analyze the Reports
Reports are a vital part of any staff notification solution. They will help to indicate to you where there are issues with the notification system, where staff are not reading their notifications, and help to fine-tune the system and ensure that it is as close to perfect as possible.
Why SimplyCast?
We have a complete, digital engagement-powered staff notification solution.
As mentioned before, the solution uses completely customizable technology so you can tweak it to meet your organization’s specific requirements. We have used our in-house marketing automation tool and incorporated our SMS, email, voice broadcasting, and CRM software to build this solution.
Don’t worry about scalability and security! SimplyCast is an ISO 27001:2013-certified company with data centers in the USA and Canada. This means we can assure you that your confidential data is safe on our secure server and the messages you transmit are completely encrypted. Our platform has the capacity to send nearly 100,000+ messages every hour and allows 10,000+ concurrent sessions. We can also get additional gateways and servers if you need them.
Most importantly, we have a 99.5% minimum uptime. With our solution, you can have peace of mind.
Interested?
Don’t wait! Our experts are ready to give you a one-on-one demo to explain how this solution works.
Simply request a demo by clicking the button below and let us show you how our solution can help you manage your automated staff notification system more efficiently.
