You can use emergency broadcast messages to send messages to specific employees or groups of employees. They include the following delivery methods:
- Message Center
- 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 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 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.
- Note: Text message notifications aren't available for Message Center messages. Mobile push notifications aren't available for emergency broadcasts.
To support SMS emergency broadcasts, the Text Message delivery channel in the Channels tab of System Admin > System Notifications for the Emergency Broadcast notification type is enabled by default. Administrators can deactivate it if needed. Also, you must enable the Send SMS role feature in Application Container > Messaging > Can Create Emergency Broadcast in the Features tab in System Admin > Roles. This subfeature isn't enabled by default because text messaging has associated costs.
You can send emergency broadcasts by email, Message Center messages, and SMS. You can edit the checkboxes for Send SMS and Send Email only if your client property settings for Email, Message Center, and Text Message are enabled in the Channels tab of System Admin > System Notifications for the Emergency Broadcast notification type. If you select the checkbox to send an SMS message, Dayforce shows a field to enter the message.
Emergency broadcasts are sent to the email addresses and alert-enabled phone numbers that employees have in their profile. Dayforce shows the number of recipients that can't receive a message using that method, if applicable, and why.
You can specify to send emergency broadcast messages to verified or all email 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 when you click Send, and doesn’t send the emergency broadcast for 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 information 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).