The Pros and Cons of Using an Emergency Notification System

The world we live in is often unpredictable. A crisis could be looming and when it happens, your organization will have little-to-no time to react.

From informing your employees about cyber attacks through to terrorism, active shooters and natural disasters, there are a range of potential situations that your company could find itself in the midst of.

Alerting employees to these threats and providing them with information about what steps to take next can avoid potential worsening of the problem and can even be the difference between life and death.

Many organizations are looking for innovative ways to communicate with their employees in these types of scenarios. One popular method is implementing an emergency notification system to replace traditional communication channels that just aren’t up to the job of communicating effectively in a crisis situation.

An emergency notification system enables you to send information to a large volume of recipients in very quick amount of time. These systems are designed so that they will be easily seen by employees, meaning that they can quickly take the appropriate action to be safe.

When it comes to investing in an emergency notification system for your organization, it’s important to weigh up the different pros and cons when comparing the different types of systems that are available.

Some of the pros include:

• Stopping the spread of misinformation – when employees receive messages from a consistent authoritative source it can stop misinformation from spreading. Misinformation can lead to casualties.
• Ease of use – these systems are generally designed to be deployed quickly in an emergency and therefore aren’t too technically difficult to use. The back-end user interface should be designed so that just about anyone can send an alert quickly if they need to.
• Delivery to different devices – a good alerting system will be able to send messages to different kinds of devices via different methods, such as pop-up notifications, SMS messages and so on.
• Speed of delivery – when you want to keep people safe during an emergency situation, timing is critical. An emergency notification system will enable you to send messages instantly to your employees.
• Able to be customized – your organization may have a unique set of needs that require additional, custom features. Some alert notification vendors, such as DeskAlerts, will offer customization services to meet these needs.

Meanwhile, some of the cons include:

• Catastrophic systems failure – in some particularly catastrophic emergency situations, all communications systems may become unavailable, meaning an emergency notification system can’t be relied on.
• Out of date contacts – if your organization’s contact list isn’t maintained then the emergency notification system isn’t going to be effective in a critical incident.
• Prohibitive costs – there are some emergency notification systems on the market that are much more expensive than others. Depending on your company’s budget and financial situation, these may not be viable to use long-term.
• Apathy – recipients may not take the alerts seriously enough if they haven’t been trained in understanding why they are being sent and why they need to act.