Creating Your Alert Library: Strategies To Prepare For Any Emergency

Does your organization have plans in place to respond to any threat? Everything from active shooters and natural disasters to pandemics can put your employees at risk. Most recently, businesses have been forced to deal with COVID-19 as it continues to impact employees across the globe. 

Finding a way to prepare your organization for all of these different emergencies can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Building an alert library plays a key role in managing risks and responding to emergencies. Here’s how you can create an emergency alert library that keeps employees safe. 

Starting With A Risk Assessment

To take the right steps to keep your employees safe, you have to understand what threats your business is facing. That’s why your emergency preparedness plan should start with a risk assessment. 

Some areas to consider include:

• Pandemics
• Natural disasters - hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, winter storms
• Active shooters 
• Cyber attacks
• Terrorism
• Facility management issues - power outages, fires, chemical spills

Once you’ve listed out the threats that your organization faces, consider the likelihood of that threat occurring in the next five years and its severity. Then you can start creating your alert library. 

How To Create Your Emergency Alert Library

You can begin creating alerts for each of the scenarios you identified during your risk assessment. Before drafting these alerts, it’s important to think about these three components: 

Audience:

Who is the alert going to? With an emergency notification system featuring in-app GPS check-ins, you can target only those people affected by a location-based event.

Message: 

What should the alert say? Your message is meant to help protect people, so it should be short with easy-to-understand language.

Mode: 

What channels are you going to use? It’s best to have the option to send messages across multiple channels, from email and text to mobile app push notifications and pagers.

Writing Your Alerts

At this point, you can begin creating the alerts you’ll send out during emergencies. Your alerts should always answer these three questions:

• What is the hazard?
• Where is the hazard located?
• What protective actions do you want people to take?

For example, if there is a facility management issue, such as a chemical spill, your alert may look like this:

Chemical spill by the Northside Buildings. Quad Road is closed. Use Lake Drive to access buildings 103 and 104.

Remember, your pre-scripted alerts should get the necessary information out to people so they can react quickly and stay safe. Effective alerts are brief and stick to the facts.

Distributing Pre-Written Alerts 

In the event of an emergency, many communication system may fail. This means that even if your alerts are pre-written, getting them to your employees at the right time can be a challenge. 

Having an emergency notification system like AlertFind that offers secure out-of-band communication solves this problem. With AlertFind’s secure off-network ENS, you can send alerts to employees even when systems are down. 

Keep Your Employees Safe During Any Emergency

Don’t wait until an emergency is actually underway. Once an emergency strikes, you'll want to alert your employees without delay.  Take action today and create pre-written alerts that will help protect your employees. 

Want to learn more about how you can prepare your organization for an emergency? Read our Creating Your Emergency Alert Library E-book.