How Push Notifications Work in the Virtual Event Portal

Push notifications in PheedLoop's virtual event system are a great way for your attendees to be notified of new announcements by your event, private messages, and video calls. What makes PheedLoop's push notifications particularly powerful is the fact that browser-based push notifications are also sent when the event is offline, and attendees are not actively participating in the event. This makes your virtual event a valuable tool for attendees even when the event isn't running, and helps build real-time community interactions.

Enabling Push Notifications

The first time you log in to the virtual event portal, after 15 seconds you will receive a pop-up notification in the portal asking you to enable your browser to send push notifications. There will be two pop-ups, one from PheedLoop explaining to your attendees the value of notifications, and the other native to your browser which must be accepted in order to actually receive notifications. After clicking the "Allow" button in your browser, notifications will be sent your way (unless you disabled them at your account level via your settings section) for new announcements that are push enabled, or private messages and video calls.

In some instances, you may have disabled push notifications in your browser - perhaps the first time you saw the pop-up. In such instances, you will have to manually re-enable them, just like any native application. To do so, click on the lock icon in the URL bar, to enable the Notifications permission.

Viewing Push Notifications

To view a push notification, you'll want to ensure you're running a clean experiment that simulates what a real-life scenario may look like between two remote attendees.

1. Have yourself and a colleague open up your browser and log in to the virtual event portal with two distinct user credentials (you cannot use the same credentials as they will overwrite each other's push notification tokens). Ensure you have both enabled push notifications as per the instructions above, as well as under your Account section in the virtual event portal itself.
2. Ask your colleague to head over to the Networking section, and start a chat with you while you are participating in a session, for example.
3. You will notice at the bottom left-hand side of the screen, a notification message with your colleague's name and message. The in-portal notifications are not clickable.
4. Without navigating away, now ask your colleague to join a video call. You will again see a message indicating that they have joined a video call. A similar notification will be sent your way if they leave the video call.
5. As a final experiment, you should close your tab containing the virtual event entirely. Ask your colleague to send you a private message again. In your operating system's notification system, you should see a message pop-up even while you are away from the event. Clicking on that pop-up will immediately bring you back into the event experience to continue the conversation with your colleague.

A similar experience should be observed if you were to send a push notification based announcement via your event's Communications section.

Example of an in-app push notification of a direct chat message

Example of an in-app push notification of a new video call

Example of a push notification sent to the user's operating system when they are away from the virtual event portal