Recovery
Recovery should not be overlooked as part of the emergency alerting communication plan. This is the final phase of emergency management – returning the campus to its normal state.
- Again, determine the decision makers. Who on the team has the authority to recall a lockdown? Who determines if the crisis is complete? Again this takes some planning according to your risk predictions. As you know, in some events, staff on the ground may lack complete visibility of a threat.
Most schools recognize that distressed communication of a still-active threat is a high risk issue. Your emergency preparedness scenarios must include a process to declare a threat fully mitigated, and assign responsibility to those who make that final determination.
- Provide a smooth transition from Crisis to Normal mode. Many customers structure an “all-clear” message that communicates the end of an event. Once your decision-makers have called a situation clear, send a concise alert to the community announcing this fact referencing any available information resources that are available to explain the situation that has occurred.
Evaluation and Assessment
Finally, ensure you institutionalize a process of continual improvement by critically evaluating the incident and assessing areas for improvement. Make sure the results are fed back into your planning process and assigned owners and deadlines.
- Post-mortem analysis and continual improvement. Your emergency management plan is a great starting point, and each event will demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of your response protocols. Be sure to establish a discipline around reviewing events with all affected constituents, and follow up with a formal analysis.
- Establish a process of continual review and improvement. Review plans at least yearly and immediately following any event. Some institutions go so far as to establish a number of days after an event by which a written analysis should be completed
- Participate in sharing best practices with peers and among constituents of safety, security, and emergency planning across campus.
- Did you overcommunicate, undercommunicate, or get it just right during the crisis? Look at the big picture to understand the efficacy of your response to the event.
- Stay in touch with the issues affecting higher education via participation in key organizations such as EDUCAUSE, IACLEA, and other campus safety organizations.
- In your notification management tool itself, utilize available reporting features. Standard practice following any alert event should be for the primary emergency administrator to review all reports and data that are collected during the alert. A summary report of the alert might be produced interpreting these data and distributed to constituents. Important statistics include:
- Description of the alert event and its outcomes.
- Log of events in the execution of the safety protocol, including timings on alert sending and distribution. Break down alert distribution statistics by mode of delivery to show how each mode of delivery compares in terms of efficiency, rapidity of communication, and overall deliverability.
- Capture any interesting responses to messages, ad hoc comments by community members, and/or relevant press coverage of the event to provide the flavor of how the event was perceived by the campus community.
- Analyze deliverability statistics to determine the freshness of your contact database. Did you messages reach well over 95% of the community (or whatever number your planning has targeted for maintenance of up-to-date contact information)? If not, consider a renewed user registration effort or troubleshoot the issues. One Rave customer who had a high-profile campus threat the first week using Rave Alert was able to leverage the publicity of the event to spur a large voluntary registration drive.
If deliverability and freshness were well aligned with your goals, be sure to share this success factor with the community in your report.
Unfortunately, the risks facing our institutions and the people in them have grown complex, and seem to increase in complexity over time. New approaches to emergency preparedness and emergency management are required to protect our students, our faculty, and our staff from an increasingly frightening network of threats.
However, as we have seen, many if not most threats can be elaborated, predicted and prioritized in our preparedness scenarios. While it’s obviously impossible to predict all events that might occur in our midst, it is entirely possible to build a practice that protects and prepares us for many of the trials that await us.
