Recently we received an amber alert in Ontario, CA that was distributed by the emergency messaging system which is managed by the police. At first, it scared the crap out of me. I thought that the emergency notification over text was only reserved for immediate threats like a missile is approaching your city. This is similar to what accidentally happened in Hawaii a few months ago. Once I calmed down, I read the message. I realized the amber alert was centred around a child abduction, which was then cancelled after a few hours. What could’ve been improved? For starters, I wish it said Amber alert in bold instead of emergency. Secondly, The message was mixed with French separated by only a by /. three times. “ ///“ Couldn’t they simply put that in two separate parts. Nonetheless, mass emergency notifications are a useful tool to alert the community if something that needs urgent attention.
What about your organization? How do you get a specific message out to everyone in your company?
Most organizations practice a fire drill. Some plans for emergency preparedness. They usually have a pretty detailed plan of what to do in the event of an emergency. The question becomes, “Is your organization ready for different sort of emergencies?
How good is your emergency preparedness program?
According to the auditor general (link, most organizations do not have a very good emergency preparedness program in place. Unfortunately, the world we live in is a little bit more hostile. Consecutively, we then think about our preparedness for emergency situations such as someone in the front lobby that’s posing a threat, or a chemical spill in the warehouse. How do we direct all of the employees in the event of an emergency situation? There can be a variety of emergency situation and each one of these organizations will require a specific set of instructions whether it would be: EVACUATE, LOCKDOWN, ALTERNATIVE EXIT EVACUATION, these are just to name a few. Last year we were installing visitor management solution for one of our clients in Ontario, just 30 km west of Toronto.
They shared with us that they did not have any system in place to distribute specific messaging in the event one of these emergency situations mentioned above happens. Since MyLobby has all of the emails and mobile phone numbers of the employees in this system, a facility manager or security personnel, can log in from a computer or mobile device and activate one of the pre-staged messages which will send an email and SMS message to everyone in the building. It also has a feature to customize a specific message if the crisis situation requires specific instructions that were now pre-determined. This simple solution is for the organization to have its own mass emergency notification solution. This solution will provide preconfigured multiple different scenarios. Some examples of these scenarios are evacuating at the rear of the building, evacuating and avoiding the warehouse, or lockdown.
Each one of the messages can be customized that is specific to your facility. When specific instructions are required, emergency notification system such as MyLobby can protect your staff against a magnitude of threats. When you analyze all major crisis situation in the past, they all come down to say the same thing: Better communication can save lives and reduce casualties. How can such system do this?
Here are some of the benefits of the emergency notification system: – Unified personalized message delivery through multiple channels to target not a device, but a user. – Reduces the spread of misinformation – Reduces response time and faster communication – Rapid and reliable feedback regarding the status of employees Being reminded of some of the benefits of having an emergency notification system, I believe we can agree that there are few realizations that we may all have in common. How prepared are we in terms of emergency? If we survive an emergency situation, how sure are we that others are able to do the same? We do not have to wait to realize how important being proactive is for any emergency situation. Setting up an emergency notification solution like MyLobby is a proactive approach regarding these situations. We do not want it to be too late for us when we are accountable for not just the employees lives but the safety of the community in general.