TenFour releases new features: Scheduled check-ins and saved check-ins

Eriol Fox (Ehh-roll)
TenFour
Published in
4 min readSep 2, 2019
‘Briefing for NHS and Fire & Rescue members of the UK Emergency Medical Team’ Photo via DFID

TenFour is Ushahidi’s tool that allows organisations to send out crisis communications (check-ins) to team members via a variety of different methods such as text SMS, voice call, slack, email and within the app itself. The owners and users of the TenFour account that sent out the check in, then receive an aggregated reply to quickly see whether everyone in a team is safe during a crisis.

TenFour Check-Ins screen with multiple check-in questions such as: “Is everyone safe from the fires in Los Angles?”

We’ve made some important changes to how you send check-ins to your team. Previously, you could only send check-ins immediately after creating them. There was a need for owners of the TenFour account to save templates for team-wide re-use and to set up a check-in that is sent out multiple times over a set time frame.

Imagine you are part of a field team of up to 20 staff members doing work in a rural, isolated area speaking to local residents and gathering information over a 4 week period. Your staff might be changing locations regularly as well as working in a potentially risky area.

Creating scheduled check-In’s for a daily morning team check-In when doing field visits with residents of a community.

Setting up a series of scheduled check-in’s can help for when you want to check in on your wider team morning, day and night.

Scheduling check-ins works on a date from ‘When’ and a date ’Until’. You set a frequency and the app calculates how many check-ins that’ll be in the ‘Number of check-ins’ section, making it really easy to see how many communications you’ll be scheduling and how much that will cost if you’re sending via SMS text message. Managing and monitoring your credits is important and choosing how to spend those is critical to smaller organisations.

Maybe you want to set up hourly check-ins as your team might be working in a very high risk disaster zone or another complex situation.

Screens from the TenFour app that show the breakdown of answers to a check-In as well as the list of people due to respond to this check-In (left) and the details of the question responses (right)

You can now plan ahead and make sure that you have all known communication needs covered and don’t worry, you can still send a single, unscheduled check-in, there and then if there’s a sudden event that means you need to get in touch with your team right away. Currently, you have the option to send scheduled check-in’s hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. For any date, at any time increment from 09.10 to 23.55.

Detailed images of the choices you can make during a scheduled check-In setup. Including Frequency of check-In by hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The date ranges you can pick for a scheduled check-In to run from then until and the final results of your date range, frequency and how many check-Ins TenFour will send to your team members.

Reviewing your scheduled check-ins and deleting them is easy too, underneath the new section ‘Scheduled’ you can delete all the check-ins due to go out from that point in time.

An example of a scheduled check-In message about heavy snowfall. The left shows the Scheduled ‘tab’ in the navigation and the right shows the process of deleting the scheduled check-Ins associated with the heavy snow fall. This could be if the snow storm has passed and this check-In is no longer needed.

Just like with single sent check-in’s you can save any check-in you create as a templates to reuse later. This is very useful if you want to stop a series of scheduled check-ins, for example, if you’re an administrator of a school and you want communications to go out during semester time, stop the check-ins over vacation breaks and then restart once semester starts again.

Make sure you check the box to ‘Save this check-in to re-use later’ and be sure that it’s ticked if you want to reuse a check-in in the future. This saves time creating a new series of check-Ins for similar events in the past and allows for ‘template creation’

And finally, we now have an ‘inbox’ section where you can check on check-ins that need your response so it’s quick and easy to see what you need to respond to rather than scrolling through a long list of all check-in’s whether you’ve replied or not. It’s easier to create check-in’s and reply to them.

You can read more about these new features over at our support page and go through a step by step guide on how to create check-ins, schedule check-ins and save check-ins as a template to use in the future.

You can sign up to start using TenFour and these new features at TenFour.org

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Eriol Fox (Ehh-roll)
TenFour

Humanitarian Designer for FOSS & human rights tech. @opensrcdesign team. @ushahidi alumni. Writes about design, tech, OSS, games, LGBTQ+ &psychology.