There is a possibility that your crisis response plan is trapped in the past. Have a look at the following signs that your current system could be in a time warp.

• The risk of playing the ‘telephone’ game: Relying on relayed verbal messages can be very risky. By the time the last person in the chain gets the message, the situation may have already changed. Information gets distorted, delayed, or lost altogether.
• SMS Blasts Create More Chaos : Mass texting doesn’t guarantee acknowledgement. Who’s seen the message? Who’s taking action? You won’t know unless you start another round of calls and messages.
• Endless Call Lists Slow You Down:  Manually dialing through a list takes forever, especially when people don’t pick up. In a crisis, time spent calling is a waste! It’s valuable time that could be used to respond to the situation.

A Smarter Way to Respond to Crisis

Modern crisis teams need real-time coordination and instant communication. That’s where the deployment of a unified platform or software solution is essential. In fact, in my opinion, it’s a ‘must have’ - not a ‘nice to have’.

Using such a platform or solution can lead to enormous efficiencies and help an organization save valuable time. Here’s a list of just a few areas that can be impacted:

• Instant Team Mobilization: Alert and deploy your crisis response team in seconds, not minutes.
• Live Updates & Real-Time Coordination: Ensure everyone has the latest information, eliminating confusion and miscommunication. Control room and front-line team members need to be able to provide updates, photos or videos or any relevant information to a common area, known in the emergency response world as a log or log feed.
• Accountability & Visibility: Track who’s received, acknowledged, and acted on critical updates. 
• Automated Documentation: Capture every action and decision as they happen for instant reporting and debriefing.

Tracking Mobilization for Real Data and Better Insights

As Chief Product Officer of RAYVN, I talk to emergency response teams a lot. I hear again and again about the challenges involved in team mobilization and activation. Most recently, I’ve been having a lot of conversations about tracking the response team to understand who is ‘ready for duty’ and available to respond to an incident. Increasingly, it is one of the most crucial improvements teams can make. 

Tracking team mobilization is a key area of focus for emergency response teams looking for incremental efficiency improvements. A software-based solution that can solve this should be able to: 

• Identify Bottlenecks: See where delays occur and who responds fastest, enabling data-driven improvements.  
• Optimize Response Times: Understand how long it takes to mobilize key personnel and refine processes accordingly.  
• Measure Readiness Over Time: Track trends in response performance to ensure continuous improvement.

Having one system to send and track all messages—through to individual team member confirmation—brings a crisis response team into unison immediately. Even when distributed, your team can then act as one, with the same information and a coordinated response.

With this data, crisis teams can shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to emergency response (that’s a whole other blog post!), refining strategies to ensure a faster, more coordinated response every time.