Pre-Written Alerts: Optimize Your Emergency Communications

If you aren’t fully prepared to communicate with your employees when a crisis hits, the situation will quickly go from bad to worse. The best way to minimize the impact of a disaster and ensure seamless communication is by creating an emergency communication plan ahead of time.

A comprehensive emergency communication plan has many key elements, one of the biggest being an emergency notification system. And no proactive emergency communication plan is complete without prewritten message templates.

What Are Message Templates?

Message templates are prewritten notifications that you can prepare for any number of different emergencies, from active shooters to server outages.

You craft the emergency alerts ahead of time, and save them as message templates within your ENS. Then, when a disaster strikes, you can send the relevant notifications to your entire organization with one click.

Why Should I Include Message Templates In My Emergency Preparedness Plan?

Preset message templates optimize your emergency notification process and directly improve the success of your crisis communications plan.

Prewritten Notifications Save Time

When your organization is in the midst of an emergency, every second counts. Custom-crafting messages, building segmented recipient groups and choosing delivery channels takes precious time that you won’t want to waste. Preplanning your messages saves time and allows you to focus your energy elsewhere during an emergency.

Prewritten Messages Prevents Escalating Chaos

Emergency situations are high-pressure and fast-moving. In the heat of the moment, it is easy to panic and leave out crucial information. Preset notification templates allow for thought and strategy, ensuring that your messages contain all the accurate and useful information that recipients need.

By preplanning your alerts, you prevent incomplete or confusing messages from being sent to your employees, and you give your organization its best chance for a quick recovery.

How Do I Create Effective Prewritten Alerts?

First, you need to consider the different types of crises that could affect your organization. For example, if you live near a coastline, you will want to plan for hurricanes. Then, carefully develop a preparedness plan, complete with prewritten alerts, for each potential crisis.

For each preset alert, you’ll want to give careful thought to who will need to be notified, what channels would work most effectively, and what information those recipients will need.

An effective emergency notification is 3 things:

Brief

Keep your emergency notifications as short and to the point as possible. Your employees will not have a lot of time to examine your message, so you want to get essential information across in as few words as possible.

Specific

You want to direct your employees to safety with clear, concise directions. Use direct language that tells them exactly what actions you want them to take.

Timestamped

Emergency situations are continuously changing. Timestamping your notifications reassures the recipients that the information they are receiving is up-to-date. It also prevents recipients from following outdated instructions if they don’t see the messages until a later time.

Lastly, make sure to pre-build an “All Clear” message that will inform your entire organization that a crisis has passed and whether or not they should resume their normal activities.

How Do Preset Alerts Work?

Your emergency notification system should offer a simple process for creating, saving and distributing prewritten notifications.

AlertFind, for example, allows you to access your prewritten alerts both on our web application and mobile app. You can create and save as many preset alerts as you need, and grant multiple administrators access to the message templates. These administrators can then easily select a prewritten alert and send it out quickly should an emergency occur.

To learn more about how AlertFind can protect your people, schedule a demo today.