Create and Edit Alerts

Alerts in the Motive platform are essential for proactive fleet management, helping you surface and respond quickly to compliance, safety, maintenance, security, and operational events. Effective alert setup ensures your alerts update dynamically as your organization and personnel change.

Overview

Alerts notify your organization of important events across your fleet, from safety violations to maintenance needs. Creating alerts tailored to your organization helps you stay ahead of issues and streamline fleet operations.

• Proactive monitoring: Proactive alerts help you address problems before they escalate. This reduces costs, improves driver safety, and supports regulatory compliance.
• Configurable triggers: You can set alerts based on the unique needs of your fleet. Tailored conditions make alerts more relevant and actionable.
• Flexible delivery: Alerts can be sent through multiple channels, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, and app notifications. This ensures recipients receive updates most effectively.

Creating and editing alerts

The functionality to create and edit alerts is equivalent. 

• Navigation: In the Motive Dashboard, go to Admin > Alerts.
• Create an alert: To create an alert, click Create alert in the top right corner of the page. 
• Edit an alert: Select the alert you want to edit and edit the appropriate name, trigger, recipients, and delivery settings. 

Setting triggers

The alert trigger defines who, what, when, where, and other unique thresholds that must be met for an alert to be sent. Some alerts have their conditions pre-set for scale and ease of use, such as an HOS Violation alert that takes into account the specific compliance rules set for a driver. Other alerts call for unique settings that can be configured by an administrator, such as the severity of safety events, the duration of an idling event, or the number of days until a document expires. These are the most common triggers to be set:

• Entities: Entities are a required field and define which drivers, vehicles, assets, and/or groups can trigger an alert. Entity selection is built for scale with select-all functionality so that administrators can select all groups, all drivers, all vehicles, or all assets independently or by simply selecting all entities. After selections are made, they appear in a tokenized list to allow an admin to simply double-check that their selections are complete prior to saving. If two entities trigger the same event, such as a driver and a vehicle that trigger the same speeding event on the same alert, only a single alert will be sent to avoid duplication. 
• Geofence: Geofence conditions may be set by category or by a specific geofence. Geofences can be created and edited in the geofence administration module. 
• Timeframe: The timeframe is used to designate the time of day an alert is eligible to be triggered. This is commonly used to designate alerts that are meant to be triggered during business hours or after business hours. The timezone that will define the timeframe is fixed for the alert and does not adjust to the local timezone of the entity or recipient.

Setting recipients

Alert recipients define who will receive an alert after the trigger conditions are met. Recipients can be drivers, fleet users, and external recipients. Importantly, before any alert is sent, the platform checks user roles and group associations to ensure alerts are only delivered to authorized recipients.

• Recipients: The selection modal for recipients allows for fleet user roles, individual fleet users, and all fleet users to be selected to receive an alert. 
  • Roles: If a fleet user role, such as Safety Manager, is selected, this means that any Safety Manager will be eligible to receive an alert, provided they have access to the group of the triggering entity. Fleet user roles are always associated with a group of entities that the fleet user may view or manage. The use of roles gives administrators the confidence that alerts are always filtered to the correct individual as defined by their user profile. Roles also remove the burden from the fleet administrator of maintaining alert recipient lists as company personnel change.
  • Exclusion list: The exclusion list provides fleet administrators the flexibility to select all fleet users or select certain roles while still limiting alert distribution from certain individuals.
• Notify Relevant Drivers: Alerts with the box to “Notify relevant driver” checked to “yes” will be sent to the driver that triggered an alert or to the driver connected to a vehicle or asset that triggered the alert. Drivers cannot get alerts for the activity of other drivers or for vehicles and assets they are not connected to. 
• External recipients: Email addresses and phone numbers can be entered to send email and SMS alerts to individuals who do not have a Motive account. Email alerts can be sent immediately or according to a schedule. SMS alerts can only be sent immediately. 

Delivery 

The delivery settings define the frequency of delivery, method of delivery, and whether the delivery is marked as “Important.” 

• Frequency: 
  • Immediate: Immediate alerts are sent out as soon as they are processed. The content of an immediate alert is about a singular triggering event and can be sent via email, notification, SMS, and WhatsApp.
  • Scheduled: Scheduled alerts are delivered with daily, weekly, and monthly settings. Scheduled alerts include a summary of all triggering events for the selected time period. Only email and notifications can be delivered on a schedule.
• Methods: 
  • Fleet Users: can be sent an email, notification, SMS, or WhatsApp.
  • Drivers: can be sent an email, a notification, and an SMS. 
  • External recipients: can be sent email and SMS.
• Missing phone numbers: If SMS or WhatsApp is selected as a delivery method, the Motive platform will check for available phone numbers of recipients. If some recipients are found not to have a phone number on file, an option will be presented to add those numbers. A valid phone number must be available for a recipient in their user profile to send a message. 
• Importance: An alert that is labeled as Important will include the word “Important” in the subject line of an email. Important alerts are also viewable on a separate tab in the Notification Center of the Fleet Dashboard, Fleet App, and Driver App.

Opting In/Out of SMS and WhatsApp 

In compliance with SMS and WhatsApp rules, Motive supports the ability for recipients to opt in and out of future messages sent from our platform. Upon sending a message to a new recipient, Motive sends an additional, standard opt-out message: