Core Docs - Engagement - Fallback Chat Notifications

Rock Version: v20.0
Last Modified: 2026-05-01 1:39 PM

With Rock Automations, Fallback Chat Notifications act as your safety net for urgent messages. If someone in a Chat doesn’t have the Rock Mobile app installed—or has notifications turned off—Rock can automatically step in and deliver the message another way. Imagine a notification like, “You have a secured chat message from Ted Decker at Rock Solid Church” arriving by SMS or email, ensuring no one misses a communication.

Once you have Chat up and running, adding fallback notifications takes just a few minutes.

Warning
To maintain performance and avoid placing unnecessary loads on the Rock server, Fallback Chat notifications will be sent to a maximum of 50 members per Channel. For best performance and responsiveness, keep it to 3–5 members.

Add a Chat Message Trigger 

Navigate to Admin Tools > General > Automations and click the [+] button to add a new Automation Trigger.  

Trigger Properties

Add a Send Fallback Chat Notification Event

Once you've added your Automation Trigger, you can add as many Automation Events as you'd like to be fired when the trigger criteria are met. In our example, we'll choose the Send Fallback Chat Notification event type.

Event Settings

System Communication

We've provided an example Fallback Chat Notification System Communication with both an SMS and email Lava template. You'll find that we've provided plenty of merge fields, including the contents of the chat message that was sent, allowing you to provide as little or as much detail as you'd like in the fallback notification. The ultimate goal should be to bring the individual to the conversation by providing a link to get them there.

Deep Linking to the Rock Mobile Chat Page

Follow the documentation on Deep Linking to configure a link to the page within your Rock Mobile App that contains the Chat View block and use that link within your System Communication to bring individuals directly to the app if they already have it installed (but have notifications disabled).

Mailgun's tracking of links within an email sent by Rock will break Deep Linking, and the individual will instead be taken directly to the Deep Link's fallback page. In order to prevent this, add the following attribute to the link within your email's Message Body:
Link Attribute
<a href="{{ chatUrl }}" disable-tracking="true">{{ chatUrl }}</a>
It's likely that SendGrid has a similar mechanism to disable tracking.

Linking to the Web Chat View Block

You can also use Rock's Chat View block within a Rock website. Be sure to add this block to a page on your public-facing website and use this as the Fallback Page when setting up your Deep Link.