How Our Customers Use AlertMedia During Hurricane Season

If your organization finds itself in the path of an approaching hurricane, you need to react swiftly and decisively. Several of AlertMedia’s customers understand this reality all too well. They shared how they use our product to keep their people and business safe during all phases of a storm.

Successfully navigating a hurricane usually comes down to two main factors: threat monitoring and communication.

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.

As the storm nears, you need reliable communication channels so you can identify which employees and assets are at risk. Multiple factors go into this calculation, but the most important is your employees’ locations in relation to the storm’s trajectory.

AlertMedia customers take advantage of our product’s cutting-edge capabilities to bring these ingredients together into one unified system.

Whenever our customers need to communicate with their people—whether for office closures or regional evacuations—AlertMedia makes sure 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, call, etc.), surveying employees to see who needs further assistance, and creating event pages to provide the most up-to-date information.

Olson & Olson Implements AlertMedia in Hours to Ensure Safety During a Hurricane

Olson & Olson is a law firm that offers legal services to over 30 cities and other local and regional governmental entities in Southeast Texas. Olson & Olson is based in Houston, where flooding frequently threatens land, infrastructure, and people. On an average of four to five days out of the year, Harris County, Texas, is inundated with heavy rainfall that can take lives, flood homes and freeways, and cause extensive damage.

To prepare for a hurricane that was forecast to hit Houston during Memorial Day weekend in 2015—and the resulting flooding—Olson & Olson needed an emergency communication solution to keep its employees informed. But its previous emergency communication solution proved to be unreliable on the morning of an approaching hurricane. That’s when Olson & Olson turned to AlertMedia.

The firm desperately needed a reliable emergency communication provider that could implement its software within hours, not days or months. With the hurricane advancing rapidly, the product needed to be user-friendly and require minimal training so Olson & Olson could immediately begin communicating with employees. AlertMedia’s same-day implementation and two-way communication capabilities allowed Olson & Olson to begin communicating with its people within just four hours.

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’re 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 5 storm: Hurricane Dorian. They came to AlertMedia looking for a system they could use to warn their employees about closures and safety protocols regarding the hurricane that was quickly approaching.

Within hours, 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 one-way communication simply doesn’t cut it during hurricane season. They needed a way to verify 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.

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 available to download, whether you are an AlertMedia customer or not.