Creating an Alert with Citizen Connect

Citizen Connect allows users to create dynamic and customizable alerts for specific locations. These alerts notify users of new records added to the datasets behind Citizen Connect. (For this reason, even though the map may show many cases set for your alert, the alert itself may show far fewer records than the map display.

Keep in mind that the alerts show only records that have been added since the last time an alert was sent to you, so set your update date for at least a week - maybe a month, depending on the frequency of the events you want to look at. For events like building permits,  if you set if for daily you may receive a lot of emails with no records. For Police or Fire calls, a daily report might be preferable.

To manage your existing alerts simply select the Alerts button on the header bar of the site.

To create an alert...

1. First, log into the site with your Data & Insights username and password.
2. Enter your desired location on the address bar.
3. Adjust your alert radius in the lower right-hand corner of the page as shown on the screenshot below. You can use the slider to adjust the radius or enter the mileage directly. Alternatively, you can simply browse around the map to the area you would like to create an alert for. The alert will be created base on the exact settings you have selected while on the page.
   
   
4. OR - don't enter an address, but use the +/- controls at the bottom of the map to set an area for the alert.  The alert will encompass the visible area on the map.
   
5. Use the filter to set a date range for your query.

6. Select the Pins from the bottom left-hand corner that you would like alerts for. 

7. Click the blue Create Alert button.
8. You can adjust the frequency of your alert by selecting the daily, weekly or monthly options. The alert will be emailed to the account associated with your Data & Insights login.

To select records for the alert, Citizen Connect looks at the system column updated_at to match the time period between when the previous alert was run and the current alert. Then from those records, any pins that are after the start_date of the alert query outs the records in a "New" bucket. Any tickets older than the start_date shows up in the "Old" bucket. (This is to accommodate, for instance, if the crime happened on September 27th but the source system was slow and it was finally added to the dataset on Oct 3rd which is when the daily alert was run).