Guest post written by Jaime Ellertson
Hurricane Sandy will go down in history as one of the most destructive storms ever, inflicting at least $50 to $60 billion in damage across the Northeast, according to early estimates. As the dust settles and our country manages the recovery phase of this crisis, it’s wise to think through what was done well, and what areas could be improved upon to better prepare for future crisis situations.
There are a number of factors that must be considered during emergency planning, such as the projected impact of each type of emergency on the infrastructure of the impacted area, the safety of people and property and the coordination of emergency personnel. However, every plan must rely on one critical component for success – communication. Essentially, the most critical component of any emergency plan is based on the ability of an organization to communicate to their targeted recipients in a timely and effective manner.
Critical communications during emergencies – such as severe weather – are typically classified under the terms emergency notification or mass communication. Historically, the most common form of emergency notification has been reverse 911. This allows municipalities to send a pre-recorded message to a list of landlines in their community using contact information typically sourced from published telephone white pages listings. Challenging this method is the fact that the use of a landline ‘home phone’ has diminished significantly over the last decade. In lower income communities, in student populations and for military personnel, most rely exclusively on mobile devices as their primary phone. According to the International Telecommunication Union, there were almost 6 billion mobile subscriptions at the end of 2011, which is equivalent to 87 percent of the world population. Given these statistics, are our employers and communities leveraging technology advances in the best way to protect our lives and property during catastrophic events?
During Hurricane Sandy, organizations and municipalities delivered more than 10 million alerts; only 10% of those alerts were sent using SMS, with 20% sent via email.
Today’s technology capabilities support a key emergency notification best practice, which is to use multiple contact paths (landline, email, SMS, mobile phones, etc.) to ensure that each alert conveys critical information or a call to action that reaches each intended recipient and is easy to understand.
To ensure that organizations can help protect the lives and property of their communities, they must implement communications strategies that integrate mobile and social media technologies into their emergency plans.
Here are five strategies that companies and municipalities can implement to better prepare for crisis situations: