An emergency alert is a banner that appears across the top of every page of your parish website the moment it is sent — and, if you choose, an email and text to every parishioner with an account. It is built for closures, weather and safety notices: the things a parish needs everyone to know today.
Open Emergency Alerts under Communications in the back office. The page has two halves: New alert on the left, and the list of every alert your parish has ever written on the right, newest first, each marked Draft or Live.
Saving creates a draft. A draft is visible only in the back office; nobody outside sees it. Making it live is a separate act, and it needs a separate permission:
Set these on People & Team → Access. When you start someone from a job, Pastor and Site admin come with Send; Parish office and Communications lead come with Write. The Add / Modify / Delete switches inside Write apply here too — a Communications lead's template, for instance, starts without Delete.
Pressing Send now asks "Publish this alert site-wide now?" and then does one thing for certain and one thing only if you asked for it:
The form is deliberately small. Every field is there because it changes what a parishioner sees or when they stop seeing it.
Write the message in English. Nave translates it automatically into each language your parish has switched on, and the banner shows each visitor the version for the language they are browsing in. If you send it to members, each person receives the email or text in the language they set on their profile — a Spanish-speaking household gets the Spanish text without anyone typing it twice.
You can also open the other language tabs on the form and write or correct a translation yourself. A translation you have edited by hand is kept; Nave will not overwrite it.
Urgent (red) renders the banner in red and sends the email with the heading "Urgent parish notice". Info (parish color) uses your parish's own colour and the heading "Parish notice". Choose Info for something people should know but nobody needs to act on tonight — a change to the office hours, a parking notice for a funeral.
The distinction matters behind the scenes as well: an Urgent alert is allowed past the hourly and daily sending limits that protect your parish from over-mailing, so it reaches everyone at once. An Info alert queues like any other message.
Auto-expire (optional) is the date and time the banner should disappear on its own, in your parish's time zone (the page says which zone at the top). A "campus closed Tuesday" banner should expire Tuesday night; set it when you write the alert rather than remembering to come back. The card shows "Live · until Tue, Jan 14, 9:00 PM PT" so you can see the plan at a glance.
Leave it blank for a notice that stays until someone takes it down. Expiry stops the banner only — an email or text that has already gone out is not recalled.
Paste a web address or a path on your own site (such as your events page) and the banner adds a "Learn more" link after the message. Use it when the alert is the headline and the detail lives somewhere else — a page about the closure, the diocese's statement, a map.
Three places, with different rules for each.
A single strip above the parish navigation, on every page, showing the message and the optional "Learn more" link. Each person can dismiss it with the close button; that choice is remembered on their device for that alert only, so a new alert always shows again. Only one banner shows at a time — the most recently sent alert that is still within its window. A visitor does not need an account to see it.
Sent under your parish's name, in the parish's colours, greeting the person by first name, with the alert as its body. Emergency alerts are the one kind of parish email a parishioner cannot switch off: their notification preferences show the "Emergency alerts" row locked to always-on, and someone who has unsubscribed from all parish email is told they will still receive emergency alerts and account messages. For that reason alert emails carry no unsubscribe link.
Texts are different: nobody receives one unless they have a phone number on file and have opted in to texts on their profile. The text reads "Nave (Your Parish): " followed by the message, and — unlike reminders — carries no "Reply STOP" footer, because it is a safety message rather than a mailing. Texts go out only where texting has been switched on for your parish; otherwise the alert still reaches everyone by email and the banner.
Alerts are delivered, not filed: they are not threads in a parishioner's Inbox. What a person can see is the record of what was sent to them — the portal's message history lists every email and text they have received from the parish, alerts included, with the date.
Every alert that is created or deleted is written to the Activity Log under Governance, with who did it and when — an entry the person cannot edit or remove afterwards. Every email and text an alert produces sits in the Email Log with its delivery status. Between the two you can always answer "who sent that, and did it arrive?"
An alert bypasses the choices parishioners have made about what they hear from you. It reaches people who turned parish email off, it skips the pacing that keeps your parish from over-mailing, and the text arrives without an opt-out line. That is right for a fire, a flood, a closure or a safety notice — and wrong for everything else. Use the tools that respect preferences instead:
The cost of misuse is trust: a parish that sends "alerts" about the bake sale trains its people to dismiss the one that says the roof is unsafe.
"Also email members" means people who have signed in at your parish website at least once. A family that is on the parish census but has never created an account will see the banner if they visit the site, but will not receive the email or text. If reaching every registered household matters to you, Invite Your Parish under Communications is the way to bring them onto the site first.
Saving makes a draft. The banner appears only after Send now. If you do not see that button on the card, you hold Write but not Send — the card says "Awaiting pastor to send." Ask someone with Send on Emergency alerts, usually the pastor.
Check the card's "until" time — expiry is in the parish's time zone, and the banner stops the moment it passes. If it was taken down by hand, the card reads Draft rather than Live. Either way the alert is still in the list and can be sent again.
Texts reach only people who have a phone number on their profile and have opted in to texts there. Email needs no opt-in, so ask whether the email arrived, and check the Email Log for their address.
You can have several live, but the website shows one banner — the most recently sent alert that is still within its window. If you need people to know two things, write one alert that says both, or link to a page with the detail.
Edit the message on the card and press Save; the banner updates in place. Emails and texts already sent cannot be recalled — if the mistake changes the meaning, send a corrected alert rather than leaving it.
Because the whole point is the one notice everyone must see. Their preference centre shows the Emergency alerts row locked, with the explanation "Urgent safety, weather, and closure notices from your parish. Always on." That promise only holds if the parish keeps alerts for exactly those things.