When an emergency strikes, response times are extremely important -- which is why you need to make sure you have the right people involved from the start. Once you have notified your population and mobilized your resources -- it’s just as important to collaborate to discuss the next steps of the incident response with your team during the first moments of an emergency.
Initiating collaboration with members of your Crisis Communication Team (CCT) within the first few moments of an emergency allows you to be more agile, and respond to issues as they occur, rather than working them up the chain of command. Bring your predetermined CCT together by including the link to your telephone conference in your outbound message, initiating an outbound telephone conference bridge to include each member, or by sending a text message calling everyone together in a pre-established ‘situation room’. Having everyone together in person (or virtually) enables an instant unified command regardless of the proximity of the participants.
If you have access to screen sharing or webcasting resources you can send a link to an unscheduled meeting session. This enables a visual element to the collaboration that will help inform the next steps to take in your response.
The good news is that there is new technology available that enables you to create incident scenarios that can be initiated in one step according to your emergency preparedness plans. Executing these scenarios allows you to perform all the individual actions involved in emergency notification, mobilization, and collaboration in seconds, increasing your probability for a successful emergency response outcome.
Some examples of some conference calling applications you could use are:
