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Newsfeed

The Newsfeed is your control room's customer-facing status board, in the spirit of a provider status page. You write short markdown posts — a possible power failure in an area, planned maintenance, an arrest made, new patrol coverage — and they appear under News & updates in the CleverAlert app for the customers you target. Each post can optionally be pushed to those customers' phones once.

It is part of the CRM module and opt-in per Virtual Control Room: nothing is visible to customers until you enable it.

Enabling the newsfeed​

Open Communities in the sidebar (under More), then the Newsfeed tab — the community register and the newsfeed share one area, since both are about talking to customers as a group. (The Newsfeed tab needs the CRM module; without it the tab bar doesn't appear and Communities shows on its own.) The first visit shows what the board does; click Enable newsfeed to switch it on for your VCR. From then on published posts appear in your customers' app.

You can switch the board off again at any time with Disable newsfeed — posts stay saved, the feed just disappears from the app until re-enabled.

Writing a post​

Click New post:

  • Title — what the customer sees first, and the push notification's headline.
  • Category — Update, Incident, Maintenance, Resolved or Good news. The category sets the post's icon and colour in the app.
  • Post — markdown with a live preview (headings, bold, lists, links).
  • Images — up to 4 (5 MB each). The first image also rides along on the push notification.
  • Link — one optional link with a label (e.g. a municipal outage notice).

Save draft keeps the post internal; Publish makes it live in the app immediately.

Pinning a post​

A published post can be pinned — at most one per Virtual Control Room. The pinned post leads the app feed and stays in the app's Home-screen news carousel even after the normal 7-day freshness window, which suits standing notices like festive-season hours. Pinning a post while another is pinned asks to replace it; unpublishing or archiving a post clears its pin.

Targeting an audience​

Every post is aimed at Everyone (all approved sites) or Targeted:

  • Regions / Areas — geography, using the same resolved area a site has on the Sites page (explicit override, else geofence). Picking a region includes all its areas; a site matches if it falls in any picked region or area.
  • Site profile — Business or Residential, from the site's usage-pattern classification. Sites that haven't been classified never match a profile filter.
  • Specific sites — hand-pick sites by name.

The three dimensions combine with AND (geography and profile and picks); within a dimension any match counts. While you build the audience, a live Reaches N sites · M app users pill shows exactly who the post lands with — check it before publishing or pushing.

Sending the app push​

Publishing a post does not notify anyone by itself — customers see it next time they open the app. When a post warrants interrupting people, click Send app push on the published post. A confirmation shows the live reach ("about 130 app users across 90 sites") before anything sends.

  • The push goes to every app user on the targeted sites who has notifications enabled, once per person even if they belong to several targeted sites.
  • A post can only be pushed once — the button disappears afterwards and the card shows Push sent to N on date. Editing the post does not re-arm the push.
  • Tapping the push opens the News & updates feed in the app.

Only in-app push is available for newsfeed posts. WhatsApp, SMS and email are deliberately not wired to the newsfeed — it is an informational board, not a marketing channel.

Post lifecycle​

  • Draft — visible only in CleverOps.
  • Published — live in the app for the targeted sites. Unpublish returns it to drafts.
  • Archived — removed from the app but kept for reference; restore from the Archived view any time.

There is no delete: archive is the end state, so the record of what was communicated to customers stays intact.

What customers see​

In CleverAlert, every member of a targeted site (owners, admins and ordinary users alike) gets:

  • A News & updates carousel on the Home screen (below the groups) showing posts from the last 7 days, with the pinned post always first. It disappears entirely when there is nothing fresh and nothing pinned, so it never clutters a quiet Home screen. Tapping a card opens the full post; See all opens the feed.
  • More → News & updates — the full feed, filterable by category, with a detail view rendering the full markdown, images and link.

See the CleverAlert side at News & updates.