A practical pre-season checklist for public-sector emergency managers and state and local government teams.
Hurricane season moves quickly. Before the first watch or warning, confirm that your alerting program can reach the right people, in the right language, with the right message, from the right zone. If your team uses Everbridge 360™, this checklist is designed to help you review the settings, workflows, and templates that support fast, coordinated action when conditions change.
Why this matters now
A strong hurricane plan is not only about weather intelligence. It is also about contact data, location targeting, message approvals, delivery settings, and the ability to keep communicating when the situation changes.
1. Make it easy for residents to find and use your alert program
- Place your registration link where people can find it quickly on your public website, not just on emergency management pages.
- Offer non-emergency alerts as well as emergency alerts so residents have a reason to subscribe before a storm is forecast.
- Ask for the contact details that matter during an evacuation, including location and multiple ways to reach the same person.
2. Make registration and notifications match your community
- Review portal copy and notification templates in the languages your community actually uses.
- Let residents choose their preferred language for alerts when your program supports it.
- Check that accessibility and clarity are strong enough for fast reading on mobile devices.
3. Tighten templates before the first storm watch
- Pre-script the messages you know you will need: watch, warning, evacuation, shelter, road closure, and all-clear.
- Use tokens or variables for details that change by zone, facility, or audience segment.
- Confirm the approval path is still practical when a message needs to move in minutes, not hours.
4. Verify weather and delivery settings
- Turn on the automated weather alerts that matter most to your area and your response plan.
- Check do-not-disturb rules so life-safety messages still get through when they need to.
- Review caller ID, message pacing, and other delivery settings so the alert looks familiar and arrives cleanly.
5. Clean up contacts and location data
- Refresh citizen and staff records before the season starts, not after the first storm warning.
- Remove stale numbers, duplicate records, and emails that no longer work.
- Confirm your data imports and updates are still reaching the system on schedule.
6. Map the places you will need to reach first
- Review evacuation zones, surge zones, shelters, and other critical locations in the system.
- Add or refresh the sites that should trigger targeted notifications if they are threatened or compromised.
- Make sure the zone names and labels your team uses in conversation match what is in the system.
