Planning is always step #1 in the development of a procedure or action plan for an incident. Should the planning stage be lacking, during situations when these strategies need to be utilized, essential tasks will likely be either incomplete or missing, resulting in an insufficient response to the situation.
SimplyCast realizes just how essential having an event template for any situation is. Through the EmergHub emergency communication platform, you are able to easily create a step-by-step plan that includes any communication tasks that will need to be performed. The Event module allows you to take advantage of multiple EmergHub applications, such as Recall, Live Survey, Alerts, and Instant Teleconference, and add them as steps in the plan.
The first thing that must be done in the Event module when creating an action plan is to create a draft of the event procedure. This is when you will add the specific tasks required to be completed during any incident of this nature. For example, say you were creating a communication procedure for a forest fire. The first step in the event template draft, potentially, would be to alert the residents in the affected area. You would add an Alerts task as the first step of the event draft, and pre-configure the notification that will need to be sent in case of a fire (it's recommended the message be fairly generic so that it will easily be able to be modified to be more relevant to each specific fire).
Next, you may wish to send out a poll to determine the breadth of the fire. Here, you would add a Live Survey task to the draft and configure the question you would like to ask and any available answer options. You are also able to create tasks for each of the other EmergHub modules as required.
By default, once an event procedure is launched, each of these tasks will need to be manually deployed one at a time by the event manager. While this may be how some plans will need to be deployed, others may require a couple tasks to begin at the same time, or to be deployed immediately upon the launch of the event. The Event module possesses a very neat auto-start feature that can allow you to do just this. When configuring a task, you are able to enable the auto-start functionality and offset the task's deployment from the launch of the event template - determining whether you wish the task to be initiated as soon as the event is launched, or however many minutes after the event's start time.
Once you have added all the required tasks for the particular event draft, you can then customize the dashboard that will be viewed once the event gets launched. You will be able to add reporting widgets for your Alerts, Recall, Live Survey tasks, as well as any Blueprint Reporting widgets that you need to help you manage the specific assets pertaining to this event type. During a live event, these widgets will populate with the results and responses that come back from the communications you send out as part of your task list so you are able to see at a glance who responded to a particular alert, live survey, etc.
After you have configured your draft to your required specifications and saved your progress, the next step is to save the draft as a template, meaning the basic event structure will not be able to be changed. A draft of the event will remain in the system however, meaning you are still able to make any necessary changes, though you will need to save it as a new event template when finished. These templates can then be published to EmergHub's main Command Hub Dashboard in the Event Launcher widget where they will be accessible for easy launching whenever needed.
Having a pre-planned procedure in place is essential whenever a situation comes up out of the blue that you and your business must deal with swiftly and efficiently. EmergHub's Event module provides you with a way to simply create such a plan so that it is ready and up-to-date during your time of need. If you would like to learn more about Event, or any of the other modules available as part of SimplyCast's emergency communication software, download the free Getting Started Guide to EmergHub whitepaper here. You can also contact sales@simplycast.com for more information.
