The Daily reminders tool is used to set up recurring emails, app notifications or text messages to individual people or groups. The purpose of this is to remind people to fill out event forms if they haven’t already been entered for a particular day and thus ensure new data is entered.
Each daily reminder is associated with a particular event form and is sent out on a specified day or days of the week, time and time zone. Daily reminders can be sent via the following communication methods:
- Internal only: the daily reminder will only appear in the recipient’s Smartabase inbox.
- Email: the daily reminder will be sent to the email address associated with the recipient’s Smartabase account.
- SMS (text message): the daily reminder will be sent to the mobile phone number associated with the recipient’s Smartabase account.
- Email and text message: the daily reminder will be sent to the email address and mobile phone number associated with the recipient’s Smartabase account.
- App notification: the daily reminder will appear as a push notification if the recipient has the Smartabase Athlete app installed.
- Email and app notification: the daily reminder will appear as a push notification if the recipient has the Smartabase Athlete app installed and will be sent to the email address associated with the recipient’s Smartabase account.
When setting up daily reminders to go out to peoples’ email addresses, take the same considerations into account as when setting up performance alerts: reminders should be necessary and useful to the recipient.
This example shows a blank daily reminder with all default options set; the Form Id field defaults to the first alphabetically-listed event form, which, in this case, is a 40m Sprint form. The name of the daily reminder will be prefixed to the reminder message, so it is best to name reminders in a way that is relevant to the recipient.
The Check for data field is selected by default, because the daily reminder is intended to serve as a reminder in the case that the event form has not been filled out on the relevant day.
Communication preferences can be specified from the same options that apply across Smartabase.
The Hour and Minute fields determine the time of day that the daily reminder will check for data entered in the selected form and saved with that day’s date (when Check for data is ticked). If the form has not been saved by that time or Check for data is not ticked, the daily reminder will be sent at the time of day specified by the Hour and Minute fields. By default, all days of the week are selected when creating a daily reminder. These can be modified to suit the data collection requirements for the form.
Unless a form is actually required to be filled in every day, consider reducing the days of the week selected for a daily reminder to the minimum so that people aren’t receiving an unwanted number of messages. Remember that some people may be receiving daily reminders for more than one form.
The Message field of the daily reminder is to fill out the message or instructions the recipient will see.
If the daily reminder is to be sent via SMS, take the character length of an SMS into account when composing the Message field contents. Anything after 160 characters will be cut off, as Smartabase truncates text messages to fit the protocol for SMS length. Note that this character limit may be different if you are composing the message in, for example, Arabic, Chinese, Korean or a Cyrillic alphabet language as these are encoded differently.
The last setting in this example is the Time zone field. This is important to set correctly for the users that the daily reminder is intended for as sending notifications, particularly via SMS or App notification, in the middle of the night would be inconvenient for the recipients. The time zone can either be set to a specific Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) zone, or to local device time to adjust based on the time zone of the device which the recipient last used to log in to Smartabase.
Steps to create a daily reminder
- Log in to the administration interface.
- Select the daily reminders tool.
- Select Create new daily reminder from the Options drop-down menu at the top of the page.
- Name the daily reminder.
- Select the event form that the daily reminder is for.
- Set Check for data to the most suitable setting.
- Set the Communication preferences.
- Set the Hour.
- Set the Minute.
- Deselect the days of the week that are not necessary for a daily reminder to be sent.
- Compose the message for the Message field.
- Specify the time zone of the recipient.
- Save the daily reminder.
- Enter the athletes or groups (or a combination) to be reminded.
- Click Save.