Welcome

They say knowing is half the battle. For organizations, keeping track of individual engagement is critical, especially when it comes to knowing when an individual is physically present at a particular campus or site. We may have to infer what their presence at that site means—are they visiting the coffee shop, or engaging in an event?—but the fact they’re there means something in terms of engagement. Rock’s Wi-Fi Presence is a powerful tool in helping determine who is on site. Let’s take a look at how it works.

Solution Walkthrough

Let’s look at how we’re able to discover user devices and, most importantly, tie them to a person in your Rock database.

1. The whole process begins when an individual first connects to your organization’s Wi-Fi. When this happens, the Wi-Fi controller uses a feature called Captive Portal (sounds like a fun place, right?) to determine who’s approved to be on the network. The good news is you get to decide who is approved. The Captive Portal process opens a web browser on the individual’s phone, which takes them to page you configure on your Rock website (just like you experience when using airport Wi-Fi). You’ll configure this page to use the Captive Portal Rock block. This block does a few things:

• Helps gather information about the individual. (This is very configurable. More on that in the Customizing Your Captive Portal section.)
• Sets a cookie (a hidden bit of data) on the individual’s phone, which provides a unique identifier for their device (aka, MAC address).
• Redirects the user to the next screen when ready.

2. Once the individual accepts the agreement, they are redirected to the Front Porch Cloud service. They’ll never see anything from Front Porch, but it’s doing some important tasks that we’ll look at next.

3. Front Porch makes a call back to the organization’s Wi-Fi controller to grant access to the individual’s device.

4. Front Porch then transparently redirects the individual to a Success page on your Rock server. The individual will think they went right from the Captive Portal page to the Success page. They won’t notice any of the redirecting. The Success page is a great place to be creative with a custom (and perhaps personalized) welcome to the network. This is also where your organization could put some ‘content of value’, such as upcoming announcements. If, for some reason an error occurs the individual will be taken to the captive portal page.

5. Finally, Front Porch consistently passes information to your Rock server about every device it sees on the network. It passes in the data using each device’s unique identifier (the same as used at the beginning of the process, above).

Customizing Your Captive Portal

Rock ships with sample Captive Portal pages configured out of the box. You can find them under Admin Tools > CMS Settings > Pages. These are provided as samples, but feel free to use them as your default pages.

If you asked ten people how a Captive Portal should be configured, you’d get ten different answers. Luckily, you should be able to meet each of these goals with the settings available in Rock. For the purpose of discussion, we’ll start with the most heavy-handed approach and work our way down to more permissive configurations.

Captive Portal Registration

The next approach is to use Rock’s Captive Portal block right out of the box. With the default settings, this block looks like the figure below.

As with all Rock blocks, the styling is totally in your hands and there are a ton of block settings to configure this to your heart’s content. Let’s take a look at each of them.

1 MAC Address Parameter

This is the query string parameter that contains the MAC address. You can change this based on the value that your Wi-Fi controller uses to pass in the address.

2 Release Link

This is the URL that the person will be redirected to when they’ve completed the registration. This URL will be provided by Front Porch.

3 Show Name

Determines if the first and last name fields should be shown.

4 Show Mobile Phone

Determines if the mobile phone number field should be shown.

5 Show Email

Determines of the email field should be shown.

6 Show Acceptance Checkbox

Determines if the acceptance checkbox needs to be shown or if pressing the button is enough to prove acceptance.

7 Acceptance Checkbox Label

The text that is displayed next to the acceptance checkbox. You may wish to change this depending on your legal counsel.

8 Button Text

The text to display on the button. You may wish to change this depending on your legal counsel.

9 Show Legal Note

Determines if the legal iframe should be shown.

10 Legal Note

The legal note text. Be sure to run this by your legal counsel for input. The provided sample is just that, a sample.

Important

Be sure to run all configuration and text past your legal counsel to ensure they meet the current best practices.

Wi-Fi Presence REST Key

The Wi-Fi Presence REST key is located with the other REST keys at Admin Tools > Security > REST Keys. You can use the key that is automatically created or you can add a new one.

Once that is done, you'll need to give that new user rights to the API Endpoint.

Navigate to Admin Tools > Security > REST Controllers.

1 Presence Controller

Scroll to the Presence Controller in the list of Rest controllers

2 Security settings

Click the padlock icon button to open the Security Settings for the Presence REST Controller.

3 Add Role

On each of the available tabs (View, Edit, and Administrate), you will need to click "Add Role" and search for your REST Key's name. In this example, we called the key "Presence" so the person picker should find a record called "Presence Presence". Be sure the permissions are set to "Allow" on all three tabs, then click Done.

Linking Individuals to Devices

At this point you might be thinking, “I see how we now know about the device, but how do we link that device to a specific individual?” Great question! If the person is already logged, or is forced to login, when visiting the Captive Portal block, we’ll create a new Personal Device and tie them to it. If we don’t know who they are, we’ll still create the Personal Device but will leave the owner blank. We’ll also add the ‘rock-Wi-Fi’ cookie with their device's unique identifier (MAC address). This cookie will stick with the device and will be available every time they visit your website on their device.

The key then is to get them to login to your website from their device. That may take some time, but you can help them along. To do that you might occasionally send out a bulk SMS message to your individuals providing them with some relevant (and do make it relevant) content on your site. When you provide the link, you can also include a login token that will automatically log them in (even if they don’t have an account).

Creating the Lava for your SMS message to do this can be a little tricky, so here’s an example.

Hey {{ Person.NickName }}, here’s video from Pastor Pete when some news you’ll want to know.
http://rocksolidchurchdemo.com/greatcontent?rckipid={{ Person | PersonTokenCreate }}

When the individual opens the link, they will see the content and also be linked to the personal devices that match the device identifier in their cookie. If that device wasn’t tied to a specific individual, we’ll also go back and link all previous Presence Interactions to this individual.

Personal Presence Details

Once you get people linked to devices you’ll want to enable the viewing of this information. The best place to start is to enable the Personal Devices badge on the Person Profile page. This badge has already been configured for you, so all you need to do is activate it.

Clicking on this badge will take you to a screen where you can view all of the devices linked to the individual.

Clicking on a specific device’s interactions lists all the visits this device has made to your organization’s Wi-Fi network.

Presence Interactions

As noted in the first figure (step 6), Front Porch will consistently be notifying your Rock server about devices that are on your network. Each time it does this, the data will be written to a new Interaction record. You can find these records in Rock under Tools > Interactions > Wi-Fi Presence. Here you’ll see an Interaction Component for each Space you configured in Front Porch. Clicking on a component allows you to see a listing of all the interactions for that space.

More Presence Options

We’ve now seen how to view presence information for an individual for an entire network. There’s a couple of other options for you to consider.

Personal Device Interaction Block

You might remember the Personal Device Interactions block linked from the Personal Devices badge. Turns out you can use this same block to view details from the entire network. Just add the Personal Device Interactions block to a page and it will list all of the interactions at a network level. You can also filter by date range and even those interactions that are currently present.

Front Porch Concepts

While the configuration of Front Porch is outside the scope of this document, it’s important that you understand how their configuration applies to Rock. Let’s look at some of their terms.

For more information on Front Porch configuration see: https://manager.frontporch.cloud/support/.

Frequently Asked Questions

Got questions? We've got answers!