A crisis management system is how your organization alerts its people during an emergency, finds out who is safe, and coordinates the response until it's over. It combines your plans, the people who carry them out, and the software that keeps everyone connected. A good one covers the whole incident: before, during and after.
Plan, system or software?
These three terms get mixed up, and they aren't the same thing:
- A crisis management plan is a document. It says who is in charge, what to do in each situation, and who to call.
- A crisis management system is the plan put into practice: the people, the steps they follow, and the tools they use to follow them.
- Crisis management software is the tool at the center of the system. It sends the alerts, collects the replies and gives your team one place to work the response.
A plan on its own sits in a binder. The system is what makes it work at 2 a.m. when the person who wrote it is on vacation.
What a crisis management system should include
A way to alert everyone at once
When something happens, the people affected need to hear about it in seconds, on the device they're looking at. That means text, voice, email, a mobile app and desktop alerts going out together, not one after another. This part is often called mass notification software.
A way to know who is safe
Every critical alert should ask a simple question: are you safe? People should be able to answer from whatever channel reached them, and you should see live totals of who is safe, who isn't and who hasn't answered. For more on accounting for people, see muster points and accountability.
One place to work the response
Replies, questions and help requests arrive fast during an incident. Your team needs one shared view where several people can answer at the same time without stepping on each other, and where nothing gets lost at the bottom of a list.
Plans in people's hands
Evacuation maps and response procedures do no good locked in an office nobody can get into. The system should put them on people's phones, with the alert, when they need them.
Early warning
Some threats can be seen coming. A system that watches weather and hazard feeds and tells you which of your locations are affected gives you time to act before the situation reaches your people. Read more about weather and hazard alerts.
A record you can learn from
After the incident, you need to know what was sent, who answered, and how each request was handled. That record feeds your after-action review and the next version of your plan.
What an incident looks like with a system in place
Say a gas leak is reported at one of your branches on a weekday morning. Here's how a crisis management system carries the response:
- The alert goes out. An admin picks the gas leak template, chooses the affected branch, and sends. Only the people at that branch get it, by text, voice, email, app and desktop at the same time.
- People answer. Staff report Safe or Not Safe. Someone who stepped out for coffee says so. Someone on the second floor asks which exit to use.
- The team works the replies. Two admins split the incoming messages. One answers questions about exits, the other follows up with the three people who haven't replied.
- Updates keep flowing. When the gas company arrives, the team sends an update. When the building is cleared, they send the all-clear.
- The record is kept. The report shows who was reached and how they responded, ready for the after-action review.
Without a system, each of those steps is a phone call, a spreadsheet or a guess.
How Castatus Crisis Manager works as a crisis management system
Castatus crisis management software covers the whole incident, not just the first message:
- Before. Write emergency and routine messages ahead of time as templates, keep plans and evacuation maps in the Document Library, and keep contacts current with a daily sync from Active Directory or a daily CSV import over SFTP. Weather & Hazard Alerts watch national feeds, including the National Weather Service, NOAA, USGS and FEMA, and tell you which of your locations are affected. Castatus never sends to your people on its own. You decide.
- During. Send by text, voice, email, the SAFESTATUS® app and Desktop Alerts at the same time, and see who is Safe, Not Safe and Unknown as replies come in. Every help request, incident report, chat and text reply lands in the Crisis Manager Inbox, where several admins can work at once and everyone sees who is talking with each person. CASTA, Castatus AI, groups open conversations into the three things people are asking about most and translates messages from more than 130 languages. You can manage more than one incident at a time, and run the response from the web or the Crisis Manager mobile app.
- After. Every cast has its own report, including poll and form results, and you can export a full Inbox conversation as a PDF for your after-action review.
When an employee requests help or signals duress, the admins who receive it can turn on Critical Alerts, so the alert sounds even on silent or Do Not Disturb.
Send the alert, see who is safe, and work every reply and help request with your team in one place, from the first message to the after-action report.
See how crisis management worksWhat to do this week
- Find your plan. Locate your current crisis plan and check who it says is in charge. Make sure those people still work there.
- List your likely situations. Write down the five or six events your sites are most likely to face.
- Check how you'd alert people today. For each situation, write down how the message would go out, and how you'd know who is safe.
- Write the messages now. Draft the alerts while nobody is under pressure. Our emergency notification message templates are a good place to start.
- Look for the gaps. Anywhere the answer is a phone tree, a spreadsheet or "we'd figure it out" is where a crisis management system helps most.