Mass Notification: Take the Unpredictability of a Crisis Away

It used to be that crisis was an idea that happened to other businesses. You heard about it in rumors passed along around the water cooler – that a new hire came from an organization that went under because it couldn’t handle a crisis. Yet this year alone we’re undergoing our second worldwide ransomware plague and every business has to have a crisis management plan and disaster recovery contingencies. This is one reason mass notification systems are becoming so popular.

When a crisis strikes, you need an even steady hand to manage it. You need everyone knowing from the top down what’s happening. A crisis is made worse when you can’t predict what will happen. The more you can take away that unpredictability and replace it with guidance, the better your business will respond. This means finding a way to notify everyone of what the plan is and how to put it in place. It means entrusting all the moving parts of your organization with delegated authority to recover quickly and on your feet.

Mass notification is a system that uses unified notification across multiple channels. This integrates IP-based systems so that your personnel is notified across all their devices – tablets, phones, e-mails, by text or call. You get to set it up however you like, and you can have multiple forms of response programmed ahead of time for any contingency. This notifies everyone in your organization automatically. No one’s frantically calling someone else – notifications are sent out and can be managed from a single user interface.

This means your entire team or organization is notified immediately. You can manage who’s received the message and who’s acknowledged. You can even make sure everyone knows what their jobs are to help your organization handle the situation.

This also helps you manage the hidden pitfall of crisis management: misinformation. By centralizing communication and using the system to communicate, employees aren’t taking calls from co-workers conjecturing about what’s happening and what they’re not being told. You can let everyone know what’s happening and what they need to do from one central location. The number of crises may be increasing, but so is our ability to address it with calm, measured, and informed responses.