In the wake of several recent natural disasters, it’s a good time to re-visit how mass notification can help your business stay on top of things when unexpected events occur. A mass notification system essentially means a communication system that sends messages out to a set group in the case of an emergency.

Being Ready Ahead of Time

In practical terms, this takes several forms. Today’s work environment often means multiple people off-site. If a natural or man-made disaster takes place, the mass notification system can be used to announce on-site, send e-mails, make calls, text, and use several messaging apps to get its message out. You can tailor this to what you need. You can also pre-program specific messages for specific potential disasters. This means you don’t have to spend time writing or recording what needs to be said, you can just hit send.

Mass notification goes beyond this, though. You can use mass notification to manage receipt of these messages. This lets you know which employees have responded and which haven’t. Obviously, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, your focus is on employee safety and security. As this is achieved, you can turn things over to managing your organization itself to cope with the disaster.\

Matching to Disaster Recovery Plans

If you have a disaster recovery plan, you have steps that each department or employee takes to make sure the organization misses as few steps as possible. You can use mass notification to stage these responsibilities. Again, everything needed can be written or recorded ahead of time to match the phases of your disaster recovery plan. You can also change things on the fly to adapt to unforeseen issues. You can set various notification lists ahead of time, and time when messages go out. For large organizations, this allows you to easily manage your communication and delegation to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of employees.

A decade ago, this might’ve been done with frantic calls and e-mailing. Today, it can be accomplished by managing it all through one mass notification system.