Emergency management teams face unexpected disasters daily. These events can cause uncertainty, confusion, and stress which often leads to decisions made quickly. During this turbulence, team members need to remain calm and focused in order to provide the process and leadership needed for these emergencies. The most important skill set that comes into play is communication.
Fast, accurate, and reliable communication is necessary to manage an emergency response effort. Whether you’re in leadership or on a support team, all communication needs to be concise and consistent while also updating everyone regularly and often. Missteps in communication between team members can misguide emergency efforts and potentially have huge consequences. Here are a few tips to help your team relay information, tasks, and instructions accurately.
1. Start with a Direct Message
Emergencies need clear communication. These are not the times when you should elaborate excessively or be vague. This is when you want to provide the facts in the simplest of terms and in detail so that anyone reading it, at any level, can understand and follow instructions given. Simplify messages, outline the emergency, summarize details, and highlight actions needed.
Keep your communication specific and unchanging with the use of commonly known nouns to avoid misunderstandings.
2. Respond Quickly
Managing critical incidents is extremely challenging, especially with the requirement to respond urgently. Decision making for these events can be disrupted and often misguided when communication is delayed and updates are sparse. Emergencies are all different, making thorough and effective communication so important within emergency management teams.
Even if there is no new information to report, it is helpful to continue to keep everyone up to date on what’s happening, even if it’s a “no news” update. Although speed is something we rely on for these events, be sure to pause to craft responses accurately and clearly. Critical and timely information often saves lives.
3. Participate in Social Media
With over 2.9 billion people using Facebook and 2 billion on Instagram, overlooking social media is not an option for emergency management teams. Social media has become a primary source of information for constituents across the globe. To use social media properly, your team has to do more than just push content out. Although that information is useful, it’s more important to participate by monitoring community groups and pages as well as other accounts that could be useful. There are two major benefits for emergency response teams using social media: community engagement and emergency intelligence. Engagement helps agencies inform residents about emergency preparedness while the intelligence gathering provides real-time information from users in the community. If your team lacks the resources to monitor social media, the DataCapable® Platform™ has the ability to pull information from datastreams like social media feeds pertaining to disasters in your area, and provide your team with a bird’s-eye view of all incidents.
4. Leverage Available Information
Beyond social media, it’s important to be able to leverage all available communication channels. Here are a few we think are important:
- Wireless alerts: loud alarms that are typically quick alerts used for things like Amber Alerts, evacuations, and warnings to take shelter.
- Text messages: keep these short and to the point, as SMS typically have a 160 character limit.
- Email: communication in emails can range from high to low importance but is best for longer messaging that elaborates on emergency information.
- Emergency Management Platform: patented artificial intelligence algorithms and machine learning alerts stakeholders in the critical early moments of a crisis. Utilizing real-time mapping, you get an instant bird’s-eye view of all incidents to help quickly assess threat levels and potential impact on your areas of responsibility and the resources needed to protect them.
- Website: This serves as a resource for all emergency communications. Social media, emails, texts, and wireless alerts should include a link back to the site for updates and more information.
5. Update Your Communication Platform
There are many resources to increase your team’s reach and resources through digital tools and platforms. Emergency management platforms centralize communication efforts, provide real-time alerts and updates, and can provide additional pictures, videos, and visual representation of the involved area that gives insight into the level of impact. With real-time threat alerts delivered to your dashboard, public and private stakeholders can act quickly to respond:saving lives, mitigating destruction, and assuring a quicker recovery.