Emergency Preparedness
Everbridge for Emergency Preparedness:
Conduct Drills and Exercises and Plan for Crises
Did you know that 62% of organizations experience between one and five interruptions in a year?* From power outages to network failures and winter storms to hurricanes, interruptions are as common as they are costly. An organization's lack of preparation or poor response to an emergency can result in loss of life, property damage, thousands or even millions of dollars in lost revenue or reparation costs.
How Everbridge Helps You Prepare for Emergencies
Everbridge aids you in preparing your teams to respond quickly to incidents and communicate effectively to protect lives, limit financial loss, and prevent the spread of misinformation.
- Process improvements. Conduct unscheduled drills and exercises to test incident notification strategies and emergency response. Implement lessons learned to improve incident response times, elevate team acknowledgement rates, and meet regulatory testing requirements.
- Planned messaging. Create and test message effectiveness before an incident happens. Build message templates and multi-message scenarios before a crisis occurs and enact them at a moment’s notice for more rapid response.
- Improved employee protection and accountability. Keep employees out of harm's way by rapidly notifying them about severe weather, fires, gas leaks, and other incidents. Interactive polling enables you to account for and report on the whereabouts and safety of employees.
- Faster incident response. Automate and accelerate time-intensive, error-prone manual processes and activities to enable your staff to focus on mission-critical tasks, minimizing impact of the interruption on the organization.
- Better emergency management and resource deployment. Notify and assemble incident response teams more quickly using less resources. Coordinate and manage response teams, survey responders for arrival times, allocate work assignments, and more.
- Continuity of operations. Sustain critical communications internally and externally over prolonged periods to resolve and recover from the incident expeditiously. Prevent the spread of misinformation and rumors through proactive, ongoing communications.
- Greater situational awareness. Provide ongoing status updates as an incident progresses and is resolved. Include emergency plans, incident-related images, after-action report templates, and other important documentation as message attachments. Intelligent reporting enables informed decision-making, post-incident analysis and trending, and compliance.
- Stronger collaboration within and outside the organization. Organize briefings with crisis response teams, senior management, security, and external first-responder agencies throughout the course of an incident using on-the-fly conference calling. Coordinate resource-sharing efforts.
- Communications compliance and reporting. Satisfy regulatory compliance requirements through automated notifications, real-time confirmations, and extensive audit trail reporting.
*Source: Aberdeen Group, Business Continuity: Implementing Disaster Recovery Strategies and Technologies, 2008
Employee Protection and Life Safety
- Emergency alerts. Rapidly notify your audiences about severe weather, fires, power outages, gas leaks, chemical spills, acts of violence, and more.
- Employee accountability. Generate personnel rosters in real-time through polling to account for and report on the whereabouts and safety of employees.
- Safety and prevention. Communicate proactively before, during, and after incidents, such as the H1N1 public health emergency. Provide safety and prevention tips, such as symptom information, precautionary measures, and other details.
- Evacuations. Manage evacuations, provide shelter-in-place guidance, and issue status updates and re-entry instructions. Include maps and other important documentation as attachments to the message.
Emergency Response and Management
- Drills. Conduct unscheduled drills and exercises to improve incident response times, measure team acknowledgement rates, and meet regulatory testing requirements.
- Staff recall. Rapidly notify and assemble incident response teams.
- Response team activation and management. Notify and assemble incident response teams. Use polling to determine people resource availability and reporting times. Leverage conference calls to brief the team and determine next steps.
- Acknowledgements. Request confirmation of receipt of important notices, such as policy changes, and measure incident response team response rates to emergencies and drills.
Continuity of Operations and Compliance
- Continuity of operations plan activation. Build multi-message scenarios that align with plan activation triggers for more rapid response.
- Situation updates. Provide ongoing status updates as an incident progresses and is resolved.
- Rumor control. Prevent the spread of misinformation and rumors through proactive communications.
- Policy changes. Alert employees to changes in policies and procedures.
- Reporting. Comply with regulatory obligations—such as NASD 3510, Sarbanes-Oxley, Joint Commission, NIMS, and HR employee accountability requirements—via automated communications with real-time confirmation data and full audit-trail reporting that includes a history of communications, delivery attempts, and acknowledgements from recipients.
California Lutheran University (CLU) conducted a campus-wide active shooter drill in conjunction with the county sheriff SWAT team, sheriff’s department, hostage negotiators, K-9 unit, bomb squad, community hospital, six units of the county fire department, and AMR ambulance service. CLU took the lessons learned from the exercise and adjusted its emergency response and incident notification plan accordingly. Little did they know that in less than a year CLU would activate the plan in a real situation.
Interfaith Medical Center (IMC) created a series of scenarios and unscheduled messages for incidents ranging from hazardous material spills to Joint Commission visits to EMS diversions and external disasters. Read how IMC transformed what was once a "444i" into a clear and effective Code Red action plan using Everbridge.
When major disasters occur, Kentucky Farm Bureau Insurance (KFB) experiences the catastrophe as both a claims event and a business continuity challenge. The insurance provider leverages Everbridge Aware to keep operational during natural disasters, severe weather, and other incidents while ensuring the well-being of its employees in offices across 120 counties. Process improvements resulting from Hurricane Ike prepared KFB for an ice storm that caused more than 50,000 customer claims.Learn More:
- Read about our Everbridge Aware® emergency notification solution.
- Learn more about our Everbridge SmartGIS™ map-based incident notification solution.
- Contact us for a demonstration.
