Guardblog

When you download Guardly, you immediately have access to sending free location-based alerts to your contacts (emergency responders) — these are one-way messages that get delivered to your contacts by phone, SMS and email.

Guardly provides an added service, called Guardly Premium, which allows you to connect to these same contacts in real-time by conference call and instant messaging while tracking your location throughout the duration of an emergency event that may arise. We let you test out this functionality for free — by running a simulation!

You get two simulations out of the box, which we hope will demonstrate to you how powerful Guardly can be when you’re feeling nervous or feeling like you may have a real emergency on your hands.

Before Running a Simulation
You may have gotten to the point where you’ve invited a number of friends, family, neighbours or colleagues to be emergency contacts and associated them with one or more Groups. Although you’re excited to try some of the advanced Guardly features, you’ll first want to make sure that your contacts know about Guardly so that you don’t worry them with your emergency simulation. A simple email or phone call will be enough to settle their nerves and help them to better understand how Guardly works.

If your Group is pre-configured to dial 911, this is one feature that will not work in a simulation, since we try to help minimize false calls to the 911 authority. Rest assured, it will work when deployed with Guardly Premium.

Simulation as an Education
Running a simulation demonstrates how Guardly works quickly to connect you with your emergency responders, based on how you’ve configured your Group. Importantly, this will help to educate the emergency contacts you’ve selected to help you in case of emergency. The simulation will help them become more familiar with Guardly’s emails and calls as well as the web and mobile web interfaces that allow them to communicate with you from any device.

Simulation Essentials
When running a simulation, you’ll want to make sure to test out, know the position of and understand these features.

Status Bar
There will be a status bar at the top that provides some real-time feedback to you:

• Whether 911 has been called by a contact on your behalf (blue=no, red=yes). If it has been called on your behalf, the status bar will let you know who called 911.
• The number of people that have joined and are active in the emergency response. There will be an indicator on the right side that looks like “5/8”, which means 5 people out of 8 in your Group are currently either on the conference call or communicating by instant messaging.

Join Conference Call
You will only be able to join a conference call once someone else has picked up on the other side. Once someone has joined the conference call, you will get a notification in your event stream; if you click “Join”, you will get an incoming call and be looped into the conference call.

Instant Messaging
In the top-right corner, there is a compose message icon. If you tap that icon, Guardly will let you send a message to your contacts. They can view your message once they’ve signed into the web or mobile web version of Guardly for responders. If certain responders write back to the SMS alert message that is automatically sent out, we will start to deliver your instant messages to them by SMS (text messages).

Map-View
By clicking on the map/location icon in the bottom-right corner, you can access map-view. This will show your position on a map, allow you to refine your location by tapping on a pin and dragging it to a new location on the map (currently a feature on iOS and Android), and seeing how close other responders are to your location.

Send Photos
You can send a photo to your contacts by clicking the camera icon located in the bottom tray. This image will appear in the event stream for you and your responders.

Simulation as a Regular Practice
Once you upgrade to Guardly Premium, you can run simulations anytime. This is important to do every few months so that you reinforce the location of Guardly on your phone, the Groups you have available and the people who will be alerted to help respond when you need their assistance. It is also important to remind your contacts how Guardly works and why they should treat calls and emails from Guardly as High Priority.