Responding to Buoy alerts
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As a confirmed Team member, you may receive Alerts when one of your friends needs your help. This guide walks you through the process of responding to an alert you've received. It assumes you have already created an account and joined someone else's crisis response Team.
Depending on your Buoy preferences, you might receive Buoy alerts in a number of ways. The most common ways to get alerts from Buoy are through email and SMS/txt message notifications. These will arrive through your normal email or txt messaging clients, so it's a good idea to configure your clients to highlight Buoy alerts differently than regular email or txt messages, such as by choosing special ringtones. (Read Customizing Buoy alert notifications for more information on configuring your client apps.)
Regardless of how you receive alerts, the alert itself will contain:
- the display name of the person who sent the alert ("alerter"),
- the Buoy instance used,
- the incident link,
- the alerter's crisis message (also called an "alert message"), and
- any additional metadata provided by the notification channel, such as when the alert was sent.
In almost all cases, to actually respond to an alert you must tap or click the incident link. See below for example screenshots of what receiving an alert might look like. Keep in mind that your own device may present Buoy alerts differently.
🚧 TK-TODO
To receive alerts by SMS/txt message, you must first save your phone number and phone company to your User profile.
The following screenshot annotates an example of a Buoy alert received via SMS/txt message by the Signal app on an Android smartphone.
Tap the incident link to begin responding to the alert.
Tapping on or clicking the alert notification's incident link will open the alert review screen.
💡 When you click an incident link, an invisible and automatic authentication process takes place before you are allowed to access the Review Alert screen. If this process fails for any reason, you may be asked to enter your Buoy account's login credentials to continue.
On the alert's review screen, you will be shown a simplified map of the incident area. The map pin displays the GPS coordinates of the alerter's location when they activated the alert. Your position is shown as your avatar.
If you choose to take action, tap or click the Respond button to become an alert responder.
Having responded to an alert, you will be presented with Buoy's field support toolkit. Read Using Buoy during an incident to learn more about how to use Buoy to help resolve incidents.