How to Communicate During a Hurricane (Download Templates)

Is your business ready to face the oncoming storms? The Atlantic hurricane season is underway, and CSU’s forecasts for 2025 predict an above-normal season due to the swing back to La Niña conditions and warmer-than-average ocean temperatures. With 17 named storms and four major hurricanes expected, preparing for this year’s hurricane season is critical for all businesses, especially those with facilities, employees, and operational connections along the Atlantic Coast.

As you consider preparing your business for a hurricane, organizational communication is a top priority. A reliable way to reach your employees during a natural disaster can mitigate losses and improve safety outcomes. This post explains what to consider in your plan and how to implement it to improve connectivity rather than introduce new communication hurdles.

Implement a Hurricane Communications System

As organizations conceive their hurricane preparedness and response plans, it’s vital to business continuity and employee engagement that communications are concise and streamlined on all fronts. Whether an organization needs to reach out to 100 people or 100,000, activating a quick, modern, and reliable communication system will help keep their people safe, informed, and prepared when the weather turns.

The right mass communication solution is an important piece of your hurricane communication plan. It will allow you to check on your employees, let them know when they can return to work, and give them critical information or specific instructions regarding their job duties. Choose one that is intuitive and easy to use for all users. In today’s mobile world, making sure the system provides multi-channel and two-way communication is vital—particularly when power and cellular service may be disrupted in a hurricane.

Channels include:

• SMS text messages – perfect for quick communications
• Mobile app push notifications – ideal for emergency notifications that don’t require a response
• WhatsApp – connect with employees when cell service is unreliable
• Microsoft Teams – reach your people wherever they are working
• Phone/voicemail – use for more detailed information with a callback number
• Email – optimal when there is a lot of information, links, or attachments
• Intranet – use Event Pages to keep incident-related information on one page
• Custom channels – fitting for organizations with non-traditional forms of communication

Being able to communicate across multiple channels simultaneously or individually ensures every employee receives the message on their preferred device, no matter what external forces are at play. Deliverability rates increase, allowing end-users to respond and react immediately per instructions.

Maintain Your Employees’ Contact Information

Critical communication is challenging when employee contact data is inaccurate or outdated. A detailed hurricane communication plan will require an organization to gather, store, and update a large amount of contact data for those needing hurricane information. Each user’s name, email address, cell phone number, direct office number, and office location must be maintained and updated with any changes. There are multiple ways to update your communication system with the correct data:

• Upload an up-to-date CSV file
• Manage/refresh your Active Directory sync
• Use an API to sync with your HR system
• Send a registration link to all of your people so they can update their own data

Modern technology allows meteorologists to track potential hurricanes, even when they are just tropical storms brewing in the Atlantic. Early in the storms’ development, they are not likely to make the news. Most of the time, hurricanes only start to make headlines when they are a few days out from landfall. As an organization, however, you need to have approaching storms on your radar much earlier to start making the necessary preparations.

This is where global threat intelligence comes in. Threat intelligence systems like AlertMedia aggregate threat data from trusted sources around the world and proactively alert you when a threat is emerging that could impact your people or assets. Using a solution like this allows you to get a head start on your emergency management planning for an approaching storm and ensures that nothing blindsides you.

Consolidate Your Hurricane Communication Plan

According to FEMA, nearly 40% of small businesses that close due to hurricanes and other weather-related damage never reopen. No small business wants to be part of that statistic. And while large companies are more likely to survive a hurricane, they are also more likely to be impacted, since large organizations typically have multiple locations and far-reaching supply chains. To mitigate a hurricane’s impact, organizations large and small need to prepare for hurricane season. Strengthen your hurricane preparedness checklist and plan before a hurricane hits.

With a modern mass communications tool, you can get ahead of the storms and better execute your hurricane communication plan by:

• Distributing company expectations for crisis communications
• Providing guidance and instruction to employees
• Empowering those involved to communicate from anywhere at any time

A clear, organized plan will minimize chaos and help keep people safe.

Create Event Pages and Notification Templates

Event templates enable organizations to centralize hurricane updates and resources on a single, dedicated web page. Rather than sending a new alert for every update, you can direct employees to the event page for the latest information.

Some ideas for helpful content to include on an event page include:

• Photos of facility or infrastructure damage
• Maps of evacuation routes and shelter locations
• Facility reopening updates and return-to-work plans
• Resource links (e.g., fuel, water, or medical services)
• Safety check-in instructions or contact points

As admins craft their event page(s) around hurricane season, drafting hurricane notification templates around all possible outcomes is essential. That way, organizations are one click away from warning and advising their people. In critical situations, organizations can deploy immediate notifications that elicit helpful responses. Common types are:

• Surveys that encourage audience engagement by asking, “Are you okay?”
• Notifications updating the current status
• Notifications with read confirmations communicating office closures, remote access, or power outages
• Impromptu conference calls that allow key stakeholders to get on the same page

Here are two sample notification templates:

Emergency communication best practices ensure you send notifications without missing critical information or overcomplicating alerts.Here are some best practices for message clarity and effectiveness:

• Use concise language to reduce confusion and improve comprehension
• Include only essential information—who, what, where, and what action is needed
• Provide clear instructions, such as “evacuate immediately” or “shelter in place”
• Add timestamps so recipients know how current the information is
• Avoid jargon; stick to plain language employees can act on quickly
• Ensure messages are inclusive and accessible, using language that’s easy to understand, adding translations where needed, and following formats compatible with assistive technologies

In addition to clear messaging, you need the right tools and channels to ensure message receipt and engagement. Always use official channels to maintain trust and prevent the spread of misinformation. Where appropriate, you can enhance alerts with visual aids such as maps, images, or videos to provide visual context for complex or location-based instructions. Finally, you’ll want to build a library of templated messages for different scenarios during a hurricane so your team can send consistent, fast responses, and reserve urgent messages for truly time-sensitive updates to avoid alert fatigue.

Conduct Post-Storm Debriefings to Drive Continuous Improvement

Every hurricane presents an opportunity to strengthen your emergency communication strategy. After each event, conduct thorough after-action reviews and debriefings with key stakeholders to evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve.

Start by analyzing communication data from your mass notification system, including delivery success rates, response times, and real-time tracking of employee check-ins. Review your communication protocols, message templates, and reporting procedures to assess clarity, effectiveness, and speed.

Use post-storm analysis to document outcomes, capture feedback from employees and field teams, and identify gaps in situational awareness or coordination. This documentation becomes the foundation for updating your protocols and strengthening future training and drills.

Embedding continuous improvement into your hurricane communications cycle helps your team respond faster, smarter, and more effectively with every storm.

Crafting Your Plan

It can feel overwhelming to start a hurricane communication plan from scratch. Find a modern mass communication system that fits your organization’s needs. Then upload communication templates and discuss with key stakeholders what procedures make the most sense for your company. Even if you don’t plan out every contingency, having templates ready, along with a general plan, will go a long way when a hurricane threatens business continuity.

Hurricanes bring a lot of uncertainty to the table. However, having a hurricane communication plan you can activate at a moment’s notice gives you peace of mind.