Automated Emergency Alerts

Revel Digital provides an automated system for delivering warning and emergency messages to any digital signage device in your network. Both the NWS (National Weather Service) and EAS (Emergency Alerts System) are monitored for alerts in the vicinity of your device. It's also possible to monitor any number of CAP feeds. CAP stands for Common Alerting Protocol and is a standard adopted for disseminating emergency alert information. Imminent and severe alerts are immediately pushed to the sign in the affected area with a detailed alert message and an optional audible warning tone.

Configure your account for alerts by navigating to Tools > Automated Alerts. Click the New Automated Alert button to create a new alert configuration. Customize the alert configuration with the devices to include, whether or not to enable alert audio, and which event types to exclude (if any).

How are the alerts displayed?

There are two mechanisms for displaying the alerts on your signage. All players have a default alerting mode which will immediately transition to a full screen alert with a red background, white copy for the alert title / message, and an optional audible alert tone similar to the EAS warning tone. The second option is more custom and requires either adding the appropriate gadget to either your playlist or template. This option is more flexible however requires a bit of setup.

Default Mode

By default, all players include a generic alert screen that does not require any configuration aside from the creation of the automated alert configuration.

Custom Mode

If more customization is desired, it is possible to utilize our alert gadget embedded in either a playlist or template which will act as the alert message provider. This gadget is much more flexible in that it can be positioned and styled as desired. 

To configure custom alerts follow these steps:

• Create an automated alert with a custom event name. This event name will be used later in the gadget configuration
• Add a gadget to either a template or playlist and select the Alert gadget
• Now configure the gadget with the custom event name and any other stylistic changes
  
• The gadget will automatically transition between multiple alerts as well as hide itself after alerts have expired. Note there is an option to keep the alert zone always visible or hide when no alerts are active.

CAP (Common Alerting Protocol)

In addition to NWS/EAS, alerts can also be triggered via CAP conforming RSS feeds or via push from 3rd party alerting services.

Monitoring 3rd party CAP feeds

Some services provide their own CAP feeds such as Blackboard. To monitor these feeds just add them to the Additional CAP feeds to monitor.

CAP Filtering

Alerts can be filtered by CAP specific properties including:

• Status
• Category
• Urgency
• Severity
• Certainty

The values for these are determined by the alert source. By default, the alert configuration will filter for Actual (Status), Immediate (Urgency), Severe & Extreme (Severity), and Observed (Certainty).

CAP Webhook URL

In order to receive alerts from 3rd party alerting services such as Singlewire, Punch Alert, E2Campus(Omnilert), Rave, Alertus, or CrisisGo you will have to reference the webhook URL specific to your configured alert.

For new alerts, the URL will not be available until after the alert configuration has been saved.

Alert Testing

In order to validate your alert configuration it's recommended to send a test alert. This alert will go out to the devices in your alert configuration with a duration of 1 minute.

Alert History

Download the Emergency Alerts PDF