Mass Notification Best Practices in Canada: How Durham College Created a Centralized and Robust Alerting Process
By Stephanie Osorno, Marketing Copywriter at Alertus Technologies
The past year and half brought various challenges and changes to Canadian organizations. And while the road to navigating an unexpected crisis wasn’t easy, many organizational leaders learned how to enhance their communication system to better prepare for future emergency situations along the way.
Alertus recently teamed up with Durham College — a college in Ontario, Canada — for a virtual seminar on mass notification best practices in Canada. Thomas Bezruki, head of Emergency Management at Durham College, shared his experience with improving emergency preparedness within a Canadian organization during the seminar.
Bezruki talks to us below about how Durham College leveraged the Alertus Mass Notification System (MNS) to enhance and streamline their notification process, the importance of having an Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) compliant MNS, and what an effective MNS testing plan should look like.
Name: Thomas Bezruki
Title: Head of Emergency Management
Organization: Durham College
What does it mean to be the head of Emergency Management at Durham College?
Emergency incidents can cause serious disruptions within an educational institution. However, with a carefully prepared management plan that allows for quick incident response, emergency managers can help manage and minimize negative impacts to operations.
As the manager of emergency management, I design emergency response plans and procedures to respond to emergencies and incidents such as fire response, pandemic planning, inclement weather procedures, active attacker response planning, and other scenarios to minimize risk to students, faculty, staff, visitors, and property. We often work in coordination with senior leadership teams, government agencies, public safety officials/agencies, non-profit organizations, and elected officials to help lead the response during and after emergencies.
By analyzing resources, equipment, capabilities, and staff available to respond to incidents, heads of emergency management portfolios can modify and revise plans based on lessons learned and exercising/testing. When an incident takes place, you must be able to maintain the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) to monitor and manage the emergency operations and response. Further, you must be competent in assessing the impacts to your community and coordinating the recovery effort.
Why did you and your team choose Alertus for crisis communication? Did Durham College face any specific communication challenges?
There are numerous reasons we selected the Alertus System for our crisis/mass communication platform:
Customer support
System stability and reliability
On-going training
Simplicity of use (for non tech-savvy individuals)
Activation accessibility
Product quality
Prior to Alertus, we had three systems operating Durham College’s alerting platform. We have now replaced multiple systems with one centralized system that meets all our needs.
Can you elaborate on what some of those needs are?
Every second counts when incidents happen, so emergency managers need the flexibility to immediately activate their alerting system from any location. With responsibility for multiple campuses in numerous cities, being able to target each campus individually has been a great benefit of the Alertus System.
The Alertus System provides a robust solution for mass mobile notification, target group notification, custom event triggers, preset activations, outdoor notification, RSS feed overrides, off-site activation, ITS security safety, and mass notification reliability. We also get one-on-one training sessions from the Alertus Support team.
What is the impact of having an AODA compliant MNS system? Why should organizations look for this when searching for a suitable MNS solution?
Under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) (IASR) S.27(1) in Ontario, it states, “Employers must provide personalized emergency response plans to workers who have temporary or permanent disabilities.”
At Durham College, we take great pride in being an inclusive institution with a strong focus on campus safety. By ensuring we have a multilayered, robust mass notification system that can notify our entire school community during an emergency, we can confidently operate every day. For example, we have visual notifications (strobes, displays, television overrides, and computer overrides) for the hearing impaired and audio-based notifications (Text-to-Speech, automatic audio announcements, sirens, and PA overrides) for the visually impaired. Alertus provided us with the ability to meet the needs of students, faculty, and visitors.
In your opinion, why is it important to conduct MNS testing? Do you have any testing tips for organizations that may want to improve their MNS testing process?
Testing your mass notification system is imperative to your community’s safety as you must be able to get messages to the right people at the right time. This helps to ensure that employees, responders, leadership teams, and visitors and students receive immediate notification of an emergency incident/situation.
You eliminate human error by having automated crisis notifications and the ability to compose a critical message with instructions, receive confirmation that the message was delivered successfully, and deploy notifications to multiple channels to enhance the effectiveness of your business continuity and community resiliency.
Can you walk us through Durham College’s Alertus System testing process?
Each day my system runs a test that no one other than the administration team can see. Each touchpoint provides system data and diagnostics, including statistics on activation times, devices that are on your network, etc. Testing your communication procedures is imperative and should be an element of every good emergency plan.
At Durham College, we conduct full-scale testing quarterly. We also run a campus safety week, which includes promotion of our Alertus Mobile Apps QR code to make set-up easy for our campus community — it’s as simple as scanning a QR code. If your institution is similar to ours, you can separate each avenue/location for individual testing (e.g., Campus Emergency Medical Response Team only). Another great benefit is having the option to include external agencies and partners like your local police service who can be linked into your emergency notification system to ensure the message gets to them prior to receiving it from their dispatch centres.
What would you say is the biggest benefit of having a mass notification solution like the Alertus System?
Here are a few key benefits:
Investment in the right solution to build off your emergency plans (Prevention)
Continuous support from trained individuals (Preparedness)
The ability to customize the solution to meet your needs (Response)
Power to expedite the process of returning to pre-incident status (Recovery)
Testing and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) functionality
System management flexibility (Mitigation)
Customer support and security
Learn more
Virtual Seminar Replay
To learn more about Durham College’s emergency preparedness journey, be sure to watch the on-demand virtual seminar, “Leveraging Mass Notification for AODA Compliance: Setting your Organization up for Success,” here.
Durham College’s Alertus System Tour
You can also check out this quick video, where Bezruki showcases how the Alertus System is used in different areas of the school.