How Our Customers Use AlertMedia During Hurricane Season
If your organization finds itself in the path of a hurricane, you need to react swiftly and decisively. Several of AlertMedia’s customers understand this reality all too well.
If your organization finds itself in the path of a hurricane, you need to react swiftly and decisively. Several of AlertMedia’s customers understand this reality all too well and were kind enough to share how they use our product to keep their people and business safe during all phases of a storm.
Several ingredients must come together for organizations to successfully navigate hurricane season.
First, you need to detect the threat early on. Effective responses do not come together overnight. The best organizations have approaching storms on their radar days ahead of landfall.
Next, as the storm nears, it is time to identify which employees and assets are at risk. Multiple factors go into this calculation, but the most important is the location of your employees in relation to the storm’s trajectory.
Then, once it is time to act, they are able to quickly communicate with the relevant audience to execute their plan.
AlertMedia customers take advantage of our product’s cutting-edge capabilities to bring all these ingredients together into one place.
Using AlertMedia as a Hub for Hurricane Monitoring and Response
By combining comprehensive threat monitoring and industry-leading emergency communication, AlertMedia gives our customers an all-in-one tool for identifying, assessing, and responding to hurricanes. AlertMedia customers make the most out of the product by using it as their hub for every stage of the process.
When a hurricane first emerges in the Atlantic or eastern Pacific, our customers see it immediately on AlertMedia’s interactive threat map. The threat assessment engine will also quantify the impact of the threat (which employees and offices are in the path of the storm)—and the system will automatically update this impact assessment as the path of the storm changes. AlertMedia customers use this feature to quickly see how approaching storms project to impact their business.
When it comes time for our customers to communicate with their people—whether it be office closures or regional evacuations—AlertMedia makes sure that the critical message is delivered to the correct audience and read as quickly as possible. Throughout hurricane season, we see customers modeling effective communication practices as they use our software: sending messages over multiple channels (e.g., text, email, voice, etc.), surveying employees to see who is in need of further assistance, and creating event pages to provide the most up-to-date information.
AlertMedia is the only emergency communication software provider that can truly act as a hub, as we are the only solution that offers:
- 24/7 worldwide threat data
- Intelligent threat warnings
- Message templates
- Event pages
- Multichannel delivery
- Surveys and wellness checks
- Same-day onboarding
Bank in The Bahamas Got Up and Running in Hours as Hurricane Dorian Bore Down
An emergency notification system vendor can offer all the features in the world, but the software is worthless until you are able to get your employee data imported and the system up-and-running. During hurricane season, the need for quick and easy implementation is all the more important—as an AlertMedia customer based in The Bahamas found out.
Near the end of the 2019 hurricane season, a major bank in The Bahamas found itself directly in the path of a Category Five storm: Hurricane Dorian. They came to AlertMedia looking for a system that they could use to warn their employees about closures and safety protocols regarding the hurricane that was quickly approaching.
Within hours of signing a contract, the bank’s account was active and the AlertMedia team began uploading relevant hurricane notification templates. The very next day, the bank began using the system to warn employees not to come into the office and to take the proper precautions before the storm made landfall. Quick and easy onboarding was the difference between a timely warning and the bank’s employees being left in the dark.
CAPTRUST Uses Mobile App and Two-Way Messaging Capabilities to Streamline Its Hurricane Communication
CAPTRUST is a financial services firm that employs 600 people across 40 regional offices—with some in prime hurricane zones, like Houston and Tampa.
Before becoming an AlertMedia customer, CAPTRUST’s emergency notification system only supported one-way, “broadcast” messaging. This meant that CAPTRUST simply had to hope their messages were being delivered and read—they were in the dark after pressing “send.”
CAPTRUST quickly realized that during hurricane season, one-way communication simply doesn’t cut it. They needed a way to verify that their messages were being received and get responses back from their employees as well. By offering two-way communication over every delivery channel and features like read confirmations and surveys, AlertMedia was just what CAPTRUST was looking for.
When Hurricanes Florence and Chris threatened several CAPTRUST offices in 2018, AlertMedia proved its worth. CAPTRUST communicated the appropriate course of action to all of their at-risk employees. Because CAPTRUST had segmented their employees into groups based on office location, they were able to quickly identify and communicate the appropriate course of action to all employees in the path of the storm. They were also able to use the system to monitor employee responses even when away from the office and their computers, using the full-featured AlertMedia mobile app.
As Jon Meyer, CAPTRUST’s Chief Technology Officer, said, “If you’re looking for a quality emergency communication solution, AlertMedia checks all the boxes.”
Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center Used AlertMedia to Coordinate Its Disaster Relief Efforts
Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center is a non-profit organization that employs over 600 people and provides blood to more than 170 hospitals in the Texas Gulf Coast region. This includes the Texas Medical Center in Houston—the largest medical complex in the world.
When Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast in 2017 and hovered over the city of Houston, it caused massive destruction—and a significant demand for blood by the hospitals in the region. It became all the more important for The Blood Center to fulfill its mission, but it also became necessary to quickly determine who should return to work and when.
The key decision-makers at Gulf Coast Blood Center stayed connected throughout the hurricane by taking advantage of AlertMedia’s conference call feature. By allowing users to quickly loop necessary parties into a call (either individually or by preset groups), AlertMedia made it easy for The Blood Center to keep everyone on the same page and stay agile in the face of a rapidly evolving situation.
“AlertMedia was very useful during Harvey,” said DeKeitra Fitzgerald, Claims and Safety Manager at Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center, “If The Blood Center finds itself in the path of another dangerous storm, I feel a level of comfort knowing that AlertMedia will rise to the challenge and help keep our people safe.”
Putting Customers First
Our commitment to customers goes way beyond same-day onboarding. While many companies have been forced to slow their growth or put a pause on further product development during the pandemic, AlertMedia has done just the opposite—closing a new $15 million round of funding with our long-term investors in March 2020. This funding will go directly into further innovating our product and continuing to provide our customers with the free, dedicated, one-on-one customer support they have come to expect.
We are also committed to sharing best practices and helpful resources to anyone who handles critical communication at their organization. We have a host of free resources which are available to download, whether you are an AlertMedia customer or not. Check out these resources which will help you prepare for this year’s hurricane season:
