When the Wine Country wildfires of 2017 struck my city, Santa Rosa was suddenly a lead story on national news. Every family member and friend wanted to know if we were safe and whether our house was still standing. So they called.
Not only were my loved ones trying to reach me, but the same was true for the other half million residents of Sonoma County. For all their technological advancement, phone systems are not designed to handle the volume of every user receiving multiple calls at once. To make matters worse, the fire had taken out cell towers and other critical communications infrastructure.
Most of the calls I received were shunted to my voicemail, and I could not return those calls. I could have provided my family and friends with reassurance had I thought to record a new outgoing voicemail message as soon as we figured out that we were not under evacuation orders.
I could have told callers that we were alive and well, if scared out of our minds. I could have told them that we were a mile outside the evacuation zone and two miles away from the fire perimeter. I could have told them that we had both cars packed for evacuation and had found friends outside the danger area who were ready to take us in.
Everyone should add this to their emergency to-do list. The stress hormones that flood our systems in an emergency impair our ability to remember, concentrate, and make decisions. So it’s vital to make a list in advance of the things you need to do to evacuate or to shelter in place in response to an emergency. You will not be able to come up with that list in the heat of an emergency. But you will be able to follow a list of instructions written beforehand when your brain is firing on all cylinders.
This is as important for businesses as it is for individuals. An outgoing message can inform customers, vendors, and colleagues whether the business and its employees are safe, whether you are able to open, or whether you will be maintaining some level of operations from a site outside the danger zone. Updating the message daily or whenever there are new developments will be a big help to your audience.
In your outgoing message, always include the date and time you are making the recording so callers will know how current the information is. If you are following the Incident Command System that we teach, this will be a key task for the Public Information Officer.
That one minute it will take you to sketch out and record the message will reap great rewards in reassurance to your loved ones and in projecting a sense of organization and continuity to your business partners.
There is a lot that goes into effective emergency preparedness. You don’t need to figure it all out by yourself. We can help you create a powerful preparedness program. Schedule a complimentary strategy session now.
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