Emergency Notification & Crisis Management Blog

May 5 – 11 is Emergency Preparedness Week in Canada and at the end of May is Hurricane Preparedness Week in the United States.  These weeks are important. They help educate citizens about the importance of preparing for emergency situations as well as how to prepare for them. 

Community and Government Emergency Managers across North America use advanced emergency notification technology to execute the communications portion of their response plan when nature related emergencies and catastrophes happen. Residents in risk prone areas are becoming accustomed to receiving communication from their community and government leaders in a myriad of ways.

Most people don’t realize that ERMS was founded in 2002 (by two industry veterans in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and IT) and launched the Advantage Emergency Notification system in 2005. It’s not well known because ERMS has focused on product development and not the marketing machine. We’ve been amiss, and haven’t done our best to share news of our innovations and success.

There aren’t many people who would disagree social media should be a consideration
for any organization’s communications plans. And many industry experts agree it should also be part of a crisis communication plan. It certainly could help foster a tighter relationship between marketing, internal communications, and business continuity teams.  At ERMS we agree, but with caution.

Google defines enterprise-class as products or services developed specifically for large corporations and organizations. But should only large corporations and organizations benefit from enterprise-class solutions? Absolutely not!

Mobile device apps are cool. Who doesn’t like being on the leading edge of a new app, showing it off to colleagues and friends; who are seeing it for the first time? Companies and organizations are quickly jumping on the bandwagon to develop apps as quickly as they can – so they can say to their customers “me too, me too.”  So when is developing or using an app a bad idea?

Communication during a Product Recall presents unique challenges. I've had several conversations lately with executives concerned with communication during a serious product recall or food recall.

For smaller organizations, Call Trees, sometimes called Phone Trees, can work. We're talking small organizations of say 100 or 200 people with 20 to 40 people to be contacted immediately for a role to play in an emergency, with the remaining staff to be contacted up to a few hours later.

Written by Ray Ganong, guest blogger

Call Trees - an interesting idea...one that's been used in various forms and fashions for years. Under the right circumstances it may even work (in small organizations that is). More often than not, expectations far outweigh the actual probability of success. In fact, in my 25 + years of Crisis Management experience I have never seen a manual ‘call tree' even come close to being effective in a real crisis situation.