Emergency contacts and groups
Glassbreak Team · Published 2026-07-19
Contacts are the people you'll alert in an emergency — staff, on-call engineers, next of kin, suppliers. Their names, emails, and phone numbers are personal data, so Glassbreak encrypts them end-to-end: contact details are encrypted in your browser under a per-team key, and the server stores only ciphertext. Search still works, via blind indexes that let the server match entries without ever reading them.
Enable contact encryption (one-time, per team)
The first time anyone opens Contacts on a new team, a team admin is prompted to set up contact encryption:
- Open Emergency → Contacts and choose Set up.
- Your browser generates the team's contact encryption key and encrypts a copy for each teammate who has completed their own key setup. Each teammate's published key is cryptographically verified before anything is encrypted to it — a tampered key aborts the whole setup rather than proceeding.
- Teammates who join later (or who hadn't set up keys yet) get access via the one-click grant banner any existing key-holder sees.
Add or import contacts
- Add one contact from the Contacts page: name, email, phone, and any notes. Everything is encrypted before upload.
- Import from CSV for bulk onboarding: upload a CSV and map its columns; each row is encrypted in your browser and imported as a batch.
Plan limits apply at import time — the Free plan includes 3 contacts; paid plans are unlimited. If an import would exceed your limit you'll get a clear "plan limit reached" message rather than a partial import.
Organize contacts into groups
An emergency message is always addressed to exactly one group, so groups are your targeting unit. Create groups that mirror how you'd actually respond — "All staff", "Building A", "On-call engineers", "Executive team" — and add contacts to as many groups as fit. A contact can belong to several groups.
Group membership is managed from the group's page: add, remove, and adjust members at any time. Keep at least one broad "everyone" group for worst-case broadcasts.
Contact health
Alerting is only as good as the data behind it. The Contact health page (Contacts → Health) summarizes your book at a glance: how many contacts are active, inactive, or stale, and — critically — how many are missing a phone number or email. A contact with no phone number silently can't receive SMS or voice; fix these before you need them, not during an incident.
Review contact health as part of your regular drill cadence (see Running drills).