Emergency Broadcast Messages

You can use emergency broadcast messages to send messages to specific employees or groups of employees. Emergency broadcasts are sent to the email addresses and alert-enabled phone numbers that are in employee profiles.

You can send emergency broadcasts using the following delivery methods:

• Message Center: Messages are sent to the employees’ Message Center inboxes in Dayforce.
• Email: Messages are sent to the email addresses that the employees have in their employee record. The sender can send the broadcast to only verified email or to all email addresses. Employees can opt out of receiving email.
• SMS: (Australia, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada only) Messages are sent as a text message to alert enabled phone numbers that employees have on file in their employee record. After the checkbox is selected, Dayforce shows a field to enter the text message. Text messages can be up to 140 characters in length or 60 characters if you include Unicode text. Bulk text messaging is exclusive to Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Text messages aren’t delivered to phone numbers outside those countries even if the selected employees have them on file. Standard text messaging rates apply. Employees can opt out of receiving text messages. Text message notifications aren’t available for Message Center messages.

• Access and configuration:  

  • Role feature access: Application Container > Messaging > Can Create Emergency Broadcast > Send SMS
  • In System Admin > System Notifications, in the Channels tab, for the System > Emergency Broadcast notification type, the Text Message delivery channel must be enabled. It’s enabled by default, and administrators can deactivate it if needed.

Dayforce shows the number of recipients that can't receive a message using that method, if applicable, and why.

You can choose to send emergency broadcast messages to verified email addresses or to all email addresses from employee records. To avoid privacy issues, recipients only see their own name and don’t see other recipient names in the distribution list. Also, employees can opt out of receiving email or text messages for the Emergency Broadcast notification type in the Settings > Notifications subtab in Profile.

Dayforce shows an error message after you click Send if the broadcast fails to send. This could happen in the following scenarios:

• If you don’t select at least one delivery method.
• If you don’t select recipients.
• If you select recipients and delivery options, but none of the selected recipients can receive a particular delivery method.
• If you don’t add a checkmark to the terms and conditions field.

If one of the delivery methods you use causes a partial failure, you can either resend the broadcast for the failed delivery method only, or you can ignore the error and go to the Sent folder to see the successfully sent message. The Sent folder shows the emergency broadcast and also the message recipients.

Note: The Sent folder doesn’t show the failed delivery methods or the employees the emergency broadcast wasn't sent to (either because their phone numbers don’t have alerts enabled or because of their personal notification preference).