Automation has made its way into many aspects of our daily life. This includes emergency response. By pre-planning, you can automatically trigger an emergency notification to thousands, the delivery of emergency procedures to each recipient, the summoning of help from law enforcement and emergency medical resources, the activation of alarms, the locking of doors, and the establishment of a remote unified command. By launching a complex series of emergency response actions automatically, organizations are exponentially improving their ability to keep people safe.
Optimal emergency response management requires more than simply sending out emergency text alerts. Multimodality and predefined messages are both key factors in a successful implementation of a mass notification system. Multimodality makes sure you reach every single one of your employees, staff, and visitors with a text, email, voice call, desktop alert, PA system, or any other integratabtle system — no matter where they are and what they are doing — and provide them the procedures to follow to keep them safe.
Each organization is completely different, as is your emergency response and action plan, so your mass notification system must be accommodating. Notifying, mobilizing, and collaborating while under stress is not an easy task. Using predefined, or prescripted, messages through your mass notification system saves you time when you don’t have it. Scenarios, takes it another step, by affording your organization the opportunity to establish automated triggering of predefined and unique notifications and technological actions.
Furthermore, aligning your organization’s emergency response and action plan to Scenarios ensures that every plan you’ve already prepared can be actionable immediately.
In the recent Security Magazine article “Automation, IoT Enhance Mass Notifications” written by Adam Stone, emergency managers were interviewed to discuss their experience and best practices. Cleveland Smith, Deputy Director of the Department of Public Safety & Police Major at Anne Arundel Community College explains using predefined messages and Scenarios. He suggests having “...pre-scripted messages for a whole range of possible events,” so when necessary, he and his team are able to “log in...check the pre-scripted message – or type your own – click send, and then you are off. In less than a minute you have everybody notified by voice, text, and email. It is all preset and very user-friendly.”
Creating these predefined messages or actions before any emergency event occurs allows you to automate the notification of people and mobilization of resources - so you can focus on response and recovery.
To learn more from Smith and other safety experts read Stone’s full article.
