Creating push notifications

• Once you have added push notifications to your Driftscape plan, you will be able to create and manage notifications from “Organization Properties/Org Channels” in the CMS.

• Start by clicking on “Add a channel” to create a new channel, edit an existing one, or delete a channel.

• To send a notification, tap on “Channel Notifications”: here, you can add a new notification (by clicking “Add a Channel Notification”), delete an existing notification, or start a new notification by cloning an existing one.

NOTE: Trial organizations cannot be used for push notifications. Your organization needs to be public before you can send notifications.

A notification consists of the following components:

• Message subject: A one line description of the notification. Ideally, a short one. 

  • This text will be used as the email subject, title for background OS notifications, and is displayed in the SMS text and in-app foreground dialogs.

• Message HTML: this is rich formatted HTML that is displayed in the email notification and foreground in-app notification dialog. You can add the same formatting elements as you can with POIs, such as inline images, external links, and internal deeplinks.

• Message text: this is plain text that is displayed in the background OS notifications and SMS text. It can be longer, and should parallel the Message HTML content.

• Associated POI [Point of Interest]: you may optionally select a POI from your organization to associate with the notification. This can be a regular POI, or even a tour stop. You can select a POI from your organization from the drop down list, or enter the POI id explicitly.

  • If you do not associate a POI with the notification, then the notification action will be to open Driftscape, go to map mode, select your organization, and view all its content. 

  • If you do associate a POI with the notification, the associated notification action will be to open the POI in Driftscape. The notification action is included in all message types (emails, SMS text, in-app foreground notifications).

• Scroll to bottom: the default for this option is no, which means the POI link, if an associated POI is included, will just open and position at the top of the POI. When this is set to ‘yes’, then the opened POI will start by scrolling to the bottom. This is probably not useful for most partners: we added this setting for Driftscape Trivia, since the trivia questions are positioned at the bottom of the POI.

You can control how the notification is sent with the fields at the top of the dialog (select one of the three options):

• Publish immediately to all subscribers: If you turn this on, then the notification will be sent immediately to all opt-in subscribers when you click ‘Add’ or ‘Update’.

• Send a test to one subscriber: if you only want to test the notification and see how it looks, enter an email address of a subscriber to the organization here (most likely you will want to subscribe to your own organization and use your own email address for this). If you do so, then the notification will only be sent to that one subscriber after you click ‘Add’ or ‘Update’. Note: Please ensure the person associated with that email is subscribed to that organization, and is logged in on their mobile device, to receive the notifications.

• Schedule send: If you wish to delay the sending of the notification, then you can enter a future date here in ‘YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm’ format. NOTE: enter the date in GMT, not your local time zone. For example, if your time zone is 4 hours behind GMT, then add 4 hours to the entered time. Take into account daylight savings time as well. 

  • You can use this online website to assist with this conversion.

If the notification is not yet sent, or scheduled to be sent in the future, then the channel notification list will allow you to edit it further:

Once the notification is sent, then you cannot edit it, but you can use the ‘Clone notification’ column to create a new one starting from the same content as this one: