Hurricane Season: Solidify Business Continuity With a Mass Notification Solution

Summer is typically synonymous with beach days, outdoor barbecues and fulfilling weekend getaways. Unfortunately, the summer months aren’t only about enjoyable moments and exciting vacations. It’s also tropical storm season, with higher risks of destruction, community displacement and business operation disruption.

With this potential for human and business peril, it’s important for organizations to implement a business continuity plan, equipped with a robust communication strategy. In this way, businesses can ensure that recipients are immediately notified of evacuation instructions or workday cancellations. 

Adopting a mass notification solution streamlines crisis communications, enhancing an organization’s communication plan before and during tropical storms, hurricanes and other disasters. It’s a sound way to improve organizational safety and ensure that people connect with each other during urgent events. 

Mass Notification Solutions: How They Work

The hurricane season has a six-month lifespan, ranging from early June to late November. This is bad news for organizations, as they risk downtime and losses during the summer and fall months. 

As demonstrated by Hurricane Michael, nearly 90,000 businesses were affected by the storm’s powerful winds and dangerous conditions. These organizations struggled to track down their teams, unsure whether or not their employees were safe. Much is the same with Tropical Storm Barry’s current impact on Louisiana, where 90,000 businesses lack power and are unable to operate. 

A mass notification solution, along with a well-thought-out process, makes disaster communications simple through fully accessible recipient lists, customizable acknowledgement options (i.e., alert is “received”) and editable templates to accelerate the notification process and ensure information clarity and accuracy. 

Mass notification solutions ensure that all recipients receive simultaneous alerts. In this way, organizations can provide timely information before and/or during a natural disaster. Also, recipients can receive and acknowledge a critical alert through primary email, secondary email, SMS and voicemail. Notification acknowledgement gives managers peace of mind, knowing that recipients (e.g., employees) receive critical messages promptly.

In the aftermath of a disaster, managers can leverage a mass notification solution to inform employees about workplace re-openings, postponements due to damages and other urgent matters. This is the first step toward business continuity and disaster recovery operations, as managers inform the right people about the status of the organization and advise them on appropriate next steps or actions. 

Mass Notifications for Business Continuity

According to FEMA, 40 to 60 percent of small businesses fail to reopen following a disaster. Organizations can avert this unfortunate possibility by determining how they’ll communicate with employees and stakeholders before a powerful storm emerges.

By adopting a mass notification system, organizations can streamline effective communications in urgent situations, guaranteeing that key people receive a message regardless of geographical location. 

Interested in a mass notification solution? Contact us or talk to sales directly at sales@onpagecorp.com for information on the OnPage BlastIT mass notification system.