Assembling a crisis response Team
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Crisis Response Teams are essentially lists or groupings of other users whom you can contact en-masse when you need to. You can create different Teams for different purposes, organized in a way that makes sense for you. To send Buoy alerts, you need to have at least one published Team with at least one confirmed member on it, or there will be no one to receive your alert!
This guide walks you through the process of assembling your first crisis response Team. It assumes you have already created an account, are logged in to your account, and know who you want on your Team.
- Choose a Team to assemble
- Invite people to join the Team
- Wait for them to accept your invitation
- Next steps
When you first create a Buoy account, you will have three default Teams available to you from the My Teams page, as shown in the following screenshot:
You can choose to edit these teams to suit your purpose, or create a new Team. If you are unsure of how to organize your Teams, read Tips for creating useful Teams. This guide is equally applicable regardless of your choice.
In this guide, we will be editing the "Neighbours" Team as an example. Do this:
- From the "My Teams" page, click the linked title of the "Neighbours" team.
Clicking the title of a Team on the "My Teams" page will take you to the Edit Team page for that Team.
The next step after choosing a Team is to individually invite the people you trust to join the Team. You can accomplish this in the Add new member box on the Edit Team or Add New Team pages. The Add new member box is shown in the following screenshot:
This box has only one control labelled Responder username or email. This is where you type the username or email address belonging to the first person you want to add to your team. You can enter the email address of someone without a Buoy account; they will be invited both to register an account on the Buoy-enabled website and join your Team.
After you've typed your friend's username or email address in this box, press the "Update" button in the Publish box, usually placed to the right or on top of the "Add new member" box and shown in the screenshot below, to save your Team and send the invitation.
After pressing the "Update" button (sometimes this button is labelled "Publish"), the "Add new member" box will be reset and the email address you entered will be recorded in the Current team members box. Their invitation will be marked as pending. For example, if you entered example.invitee@example.com, the "Current team members" box will look like the screenshot below:
You can enter the email address (or username, if you know it) of a second person you'd like to invite to your Team in the "Add new member" box, now, and then click on the "Update" (or "Publish") button again to invite this second person. Repeat this process for each person you'd like on your Team.
Adding people to your Team(s) does not immediately address alerts you send to them. Instead, adding Team members sends invitations to join the Team. These invitations must be accepted by the invitees before you are able to actually send them any alerts.
Give your friends a few moments to receive their invitations. It shouldn't take longer than four or five minutes for them to receive and accept their invitations. (See Joining a crisis response Team for detailed instructions on how to accept Team invitations.) Once they have accepted your Team invitation, the Current team members box will display a confirmed mark next to their name, similar to the screenshot below:
With your Team assembled, you may want to follow up by:
- Creating another Team. Simply follow this guide again, but choose a different Team in Step 1.
- Helping your friend(s) create their own Teams! :)
- Joining a crisis response Team that your friends make, so they can send alerts to you.
- Explore advanced Team features.
- Practice Sending an alert with Buoy to hone your Teams' skills and reflexes.