The answer to this question is “mass engagement.” People find themselves in varying situations during an emergency, which require specific instructions to best guide each individual to safety. Similarly, those individuals can provide intelligence as the situation dynamically unfolds. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to open a dialog and manage the incoming information from a large group of people under duress.
Mass engagement allows a large audience to be easily subdivided into groups, which can be contacted and queried independently as to their specific needs and observations. This approach allows rich interaction across a large group to be executed even with a small safety team.
New product releases, such as Omnilert Engage, allow mass engagement through group triage, the ability to repeatedly subdivide people into manageable groups, and with dynamic messaging, whereby each group can be individually messaged with information or queries most relevant to them. Engage offers location-based selection and messaging, so groups can be handled differently based on their whereabouts and the associated threats.
Traditional emergency systems are limited to one-way broadcast or a two-way function that forces organizations into 1:1 communications, which clearly does not work in real-life situations with thousands of people. Engage’s mass engagement functionality allows even a small team to have rich interaction with audiences of any size by breaking them into smaller targeted groups.
Given the dynamic nature of emergencies, Engage provides administrators with a dashboard to visualize and map responses in real-time. People who respond late to administrative messages and queries are automatically “caught up” by prompts to respond, assignments to the appropriate groups, and being sent the most relevant communications.