- Identify the appropriate mode of communication for each audience – Different modes of alerting may be better suited to specific audiences. For a mass audience where the highest performance and throughput is required, SMS alerts are an ideal solution. On the other hand, delivery notification to first responders may require a more interactive alert media that has better capability to convey a richer level of content and interactivity through a conference call.
The number of first responders, and the corresponding network capacity used in communicating with them, is also a much smaller number than an entire student body. In this case, a voice alert may be ideal. The ideal notification media for faculty, admin, and staff may fall somewhere
in between. Interested parties who are not directly part of the school community (e.g. parents, local community) may be effectively supported with a higher latency, lower touch alert such as email.Institutions should consider their different potential audiences when developing their mass notification procedures and determine appropriate media accordingly.
Figure 1 shows an example of typical production delivery performance and selection of modes by audience observed over many notification events by a highly robust notification system. Note that the actual environment into which messages are being delivered is the single biggest determiner of performance, but the figure details some of the different technical limits seen in the different modes:
- Consider coverage and capacity limitations of your available communication modes – Each mode of communication has its own strengths and weaknesses. Sirens are extremely effective for communicating to an on-campus audience, but are not easily targetable (i.e. any intruder gets the same message as everyone else) and do not cover off-campus users.
Landlines provide a great way to deliver messages, but are subject to becoming overloaded during high volume emergency use and many users are not normally within easy reach of a landline phone. The ability of the existing coverage and capacity of cell towers covering a campus can be a limiting factor in delivering text and voice alerts quickly and effectively to mobile phones.
Due to these constraints, attempting to simultaneously alert an entire school for multiple devices per user and multiple modes per device (text and voice) can be a bad idea.
——Article Continues Below——
A better strategy is often to select optimum media to reach certain audiences (described above) and prioritize among audiences accordingly. Figure 1 above details some of the typical uses of the different modalities and constraints seen in production environments.
- Consider implementation of an inbound notification infrastructure – An effective mass notification system should enable inbound responses and provide a simple mechanism for reporting on and responding to those messages.
Additionally, institutions should plan for a large number of inbound information requests. Often, on premise telephony systems can be saturated with inquiries from press and parents.
Coupled with even a small percentage of students calling in response to a notification they received, the call capacity of even the most robust telecomm infrastructure can be brought to its knees.
In addition to a well-maintained informational web site, many institutions utilize off-campus toll-free information lines to steer call volume off site and effectively answer most of the typical questions.
- Define coordination around the approval process in detail – Different situations may require different constituencies to take responsibility for sending an alert. For example, an alert canceling class due to a weather emergency might require a different sender and a different approval process than an alert notifying the campus of a dangerous security threat.
On the other hand, some institutions may choose to centralize ownership and privileges for sending alerts within one campus organization. It is critical that ownership and processes for issuing alerts be explicitly defined at both an organizational and individual level in the emergency response plan.
At a minimum, identify principal alert senders who are privileged to send alerts without internal approval. These individuals might be VP-level administrators from university relations and/or campus security. Identifying and training individuals who have complete decision making authority can dramatically cut the time it takes to decide to send an alert, create the alert, and deliver it.
- Establish policies for the frequency and level of communication – In many cases you will not have a clear picture of information during a crisis, yet your audiences will expect it.
In your planning clearly identify rules around the frequency and level of communication you will provide. For example, will you provide updates every 30 minutes even if there is no new information or will you update your audience(s) only when new information becomes available? Set expectations both with the communication team and the audience in advance of the event.
- Create message templates – Most institutions report that upwards of 75-80% of situations they encountered were ones they foresaw as possible threats. Pre-created messaging templates can take much of the “fog of war” out of an incident. By creating and using simple templates with fill-in-the-blank dates, locations and key details messages can be quickly edited and sent. It is important that the content created be appropriate for each mode of communication.
For example, an email can and should contain much more descriptive content than the 160 available characters of a text message. A useful list of emergency message templates is available online from Margolis-Healy Consulting (www.margolis-healy.com ).
