Tutorial: Building Guardly Groups

This tutorial will walk through a number of ways that you can setup your Groups to get the most out of Guardly. We will also cover some advanced features available when configuring your Groups and settings.

Group Setup
Guardly users setup their Groups many different ways. Developing Groups based on a naming convention or theme can be very useful. Although some people stick with the default “Friends & Family” Group provided on setup, others create more detailed arrangements such as location-based groups, situation-based groups or priority-based groups.

Location-based Groups
You may opt to name your Groups based on location and choose people as responders that live or tend to be in those different places. For example, a student may want to notify 10+ people including friends, family and a few neighbours when they’re at their Residence; however, when walking home from a night class they may choose their On-Campus Group, and when back at home with their family they may have a third Group to call upon old friends and family in their Hometown.

Situation-based Groups
Depending on your job or daily routine, you may be inadvertently putting yourself at risk. Whether it’s part of the job or a shortcut you like to take to save time, you may choose to name your Groups accordingly. For example, real estate agent safety is a big concern and so if you’re a real estate agent — Group names such as Open House Showing, Aggressive Client or Office Stalker may give valuable tips to your responders as to the type of issues you’re facing.

Priority-based Groups
You may want to use Groups to indicate the severity of your situation and make sure that you can be put in touch with more responders when you’re on high alert. If you want an added precaution when headed somewhere, you could have a Low Priority / Tracker Group and share it someone who can watch over you; if you see someone that makes you really nervous, you can have a Medium: I’m Nervous Group and for imminent threats, you can have a High – Emergency Group, which should contain the highest number of contacts.

Group Call Options (premium feature)
Call Options is an additional setting that becomes available when subscribed to Guardly’s premium service. You can test these settings by running a simulation on your device, without subscribing.

Groups have the ability to customize how you’d like your phone to work once you’ve triggered an emergency. You can choose to have your phone automatically call 911, call another number, or receive an in-bound call to join a conference call that Guardly sets up instantly and automatically between all your emergency contacts — as soon as you trigger a simulation or an alert to be sent to your Group. You can also choose not to join the conference call or make a call, if you expect that you’ll want to communicate by instant messaging.

Note: Group Call Options can be accessed from the “Add Group” or “Edit Group” screens, but is not shown when configuring your first Group to keep things simple.

Best Practices

• Ensure some contacts have Smartphones so they can access the map-view and see your real-time location using our mobile-web application.
• Add 5 or more people to high priority Groups to encourage a faster response time. With more people notified, you increase the likelihood of a greater number of people taking notice of your outreach and being able to respond.
• Invite some people as contacts who may be close to your location, so they can arrive quickly and provide any necessary assistance.
• When possible, try to add some additional notes to your Group to provide some additional context to what may be happening.

Remember: When you trigger a Group, Guardly will ensure to reach out to your contacts by phone, SMS and email. However, when building a Group, it is important that you aim to add at least 5 contacts since some of your contacts may be away from their phones and/or computers. Leverage Guardly’s communication platform and make sure that enough people find out that you need help so that you maximize your chance of a fast response.