Overview
After sending the initial emergency message, an Incident is created to manage responses, roll call, and any follow-up messages sent.
Follow-ups are useful when conditions change, for example, when the fire department arrives, the evacuation zone shifts, or the situation is all clear. Every message you send in an incident is organized in a unified delivery and response record.
Sending a follow-up message
Remember, the incident must be active. Once an incident has ended, you can't add more messages to it.
Recipient behavior
Recipients only see the messages that were sent to them. If you add new recipients to a follow-up, they won't see any earlier messages. Write each follow-up so it stands on its own with enough context.
By default, your follow-up reaches every previous recipient, plus anyone who now matches the original message's targeting rules; for example, "Employees checked in at SF HQ" would automatically include any employees who have checked in since the initial message was sent. These original criteria appear as disabled chips that cannot be removed. The total recipient count can only grow from one message to the next.
Web
Open the active incident in the Envoy dashboard by navigating to Communications > Incident log, and selecting the incident.
In the incident header, click Send follow-up.
Enter a Message title (optional) and a body (required).
You can choose a template to pre-fill the message title, body, and recipient criteria from an existing Emergency Notification template.
Review the Recipients section.
To add more people, click + Add more recipients, then choose additional criteria, groups, employees, or visitors. Added recipients persist for every future follow-up in the incident.
Choose your delivery methods. SMS, email, push, Slack, and screens are all selected by default.
If a screen takeover is currently active, the screens checkbox is pre-selected with the existing screens highlighted. Leave it checked to update the screens, or uncheck it to skip screens for this follow-up.
Click Send follow-up.
The new message appears immediately in the incident's Messages tab. You can view delivery details by expanding the message
Mobile
Open the active incident from the Envoy Mobile home screen.
On the Incident management screen, tap Send follow-up.
Enter a message title (optional) and a message body (required, 320 character max).
Tap Change next to Select a template to pre-fill the message from a template.
(Optional) Tap Attach image or PDF to include an attachment.
Review the recipient count. Newly added recipients persist for every future follow-up in the incident.
Leave Screen takeover on (default) to update any currently selected Envoy Screens, or toggle it off. Tap Edit to change which screens are included.
Tap Send in the top right to send your follow-up.
Your new follow-up will appear above the previous message. You can tap the message to view delivery details.
Tracking responses across messages
Response status (Need help / Safe / No response / Custom) is tracked at the incident level, not per message. The progress bar at the top of the Responses tab breaks the count down proportionally.
You can see a breakdown of each individual's status by expanding their row.
On the Responses tab, expand a status grouping to view more details, then click the row for that person.
The expanded row lists every message in the incident by title (for example, "Update on fire in SF"), along with that person's delivery status for each message.
What employees see on mobile
Active incidents appear on the Envoy Mobile home screen. Each incident card shows an ACTIVE badge, the time of the most recent update, and a preview of the latest message title and body. Employees can expand the card to see the full history of messages in the incident.
Employees respond to the incident as a whole using the safety status options on the incident details screen, and can also tap to chat or call the emergency team.
Exporting incident data [Web only]
From either the Responses tab or the Roll Call tab, click Export to download a CSV of the incident.
When an incident has multiple messages, the export includes one row per recipient with delivery columns repeated for each message (labeled Message 1, Message 2, and so on, in chronological order).
Each channel column shows one of the following values:
Sent: successfully delivered on that channel
Failed – [reason]: for example, "Failed – Email missing" or "Failed – Phone number missing"
Not sent: the channel wasn't selected for that message
(blank): the recipient wasn't included in that message
Static columns (incident name, incident ID, recipient name and contact info, response, response time, and roll call status) appear once per row at the start of the CSV.