How to Use Critical Alerts

Within Let's Talk, you have options for both manual and automatic use of Critical Alerts. When a Dialogue is marked as Critical, a designated team is notified by email and added to the Dialogue as team members. Please note that while Private Dialogues can be marked as Critical, the Critical Alerts Team will never be automatically added to Private Dialogues as team members.

When Critical Alerts are enabled, Let's Talk scans existing and incoming Dialogues for trigger words and phrases, based on a combination of system and user-defined keywords. Dialogues matching these Critical Alert keywords and phrases will be marked as Critical. The customizable list of keywords allows you to pinpoint hot topics in your district, bringing Dialogues about hot-button topics to the attention of the teams that need it most.

A User can also manually mark any Dialogue in Let’s Talk as Critical. If the System Administrator has not yet identified the Critical Alert Team, the Dialogue will simply be displayed as red and no additional Users will be alerted.

Critical Dialogues appear in red in all inbox views for easier viewing. Any Dialogue marked as Critical can be switched back to a lower status at anytime.

To enable Critical Alerts:

Within Settings, navigate to Critical Alerts, under Communication.

• Switch Alert Categories on and click into the category to begin customizing your options, or add a new category.
• Add team members to different categories. When a Dialogue contains a critical keyword, the team you selected is automatically added to the Dialogue and notified by email.
• Add triggering keywords to the category so the system can notify you when a dialogue contains any of the keywords.

• Delete trigger words by clicking the “x” within their box

• Or Mute trigger words in system-defined categories

• Remember to click “Apply Changes” to save customizations for that category.
• Finally, click the green Save button at the top right-hand corner to save all changes to Critical Alerts

Private Topics and Critical Alerts

If a critical keyword is included within a Private Dialogue, it WILL NOT be escalated to the Critical Alerts team to maintain confidentiality and privacy.

System default categories and additional layers of review

While you can create your own critical alert category, the system has 3 pre-defined categories for which the Title and Description cannot be edited:

• Safety And Well Being
• School Choice
• Non-Responsiveness

For these three categories, the Let's Talk system runs the message through additional levels of review to ensure the content meets the definition of critical for the category before notifying your critical alert team.

Level 1: Our Critical Alert system will flag any dialogue coming in that contains selected keywords.

Level 2: A K12 Insight content moderator will manually review the dialogue. 

• If the dialogue is of critical nature, then it is marked as Critical and sent to Level 3. 
• If it is not of critical nature, then the dialogue is de-escalated to a normal priority.

Level 3: A second K12 Insight content moderator will manually review the dialogue.

• If the dialogue is of critical nature, then it is marked as Critical and the Critical Alert team for that category is notified.
• If it is not of critical nature, then the dialogue is de-escalated to a normal priority.

These additional levels of monitoring occur 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This feature does not affect the arrival of dialogue notifications to your Topic teams. Dialogue notifications still occur immediately as the dialogues are submitted. The critical dialogue notification will be delivered on a slight delay to allow for the multi-level review.