5 Tips For Finding the Right Emergency Alert System

If you’re looking to improve the way your organization sends emergency alerts, you might feel overwhelmed. There’s a lot of options out there in regards to emergency alert systems for schools and businesses. Moreover, that’s not even including budget concerns.

To help you move forward, we’ve compiled 5 important tips. Once you finish reading them, you’ll have some trends and suggestions to investigate.

Dynamic Situations Require Dynamic Alerts

No two emergencies are created equal, and your emergency alerts shouldn’t be, either. A single siren cannot help students, teachers, or workers distinguish between a fire drill and a weather advisory.

A good way to make diverse alerts is to send text-based alerts. If every kind of emergency has its details relayed via text, everyone knows what is happening right away. This makes it easy to take action immediately.

Digital Signs Make Dynamic Alerts Easier

When sending dynamic alerts, you need to make sure everyone can see them. Unfortunately, some people do not own smartphones, and you cannot always rely on them to alert everyone at once.

Digital signs provide a great way to send emergency alerts that everyone will see. So long as there are digital signs in high-profile locations throughout your organization, you can rapidly send dynamic alerts.

Plus, smart board technology like the ViewSonic ViewBoard can serve as a digital sign. This means that technology you may already own can also serve as emergency alert systems for schools and businesses.

Make Alerts as Eye-Catching As Possible

An emergency system only works if people notice alerts right away. This is easier said than done in the context of modern life, when many screens and devices compete for users‘ attention.

If you manage signs and smart boards with software like SureMDM by 42Gears, you can send out alerts in a range of colors and sizes. As a start, you can send out alerts in different colors to represent different emergencies. This way, everyone sees the colorful alerts quickly, and knows what to do at a glance.

Use Alerts Beyond Emergencies

It’s harrowing to work through all of the emergency scenarios that require alerts. Thankfully, investing in a quality alert system can help you communicate good news as well.

SureMDM lets you send alerts to specific device groups, which you can use to relay non-urgent information, and celebrate exciting moments. For example, you can also broadcast non-emergency messages, like telling students to stay inside during lunch to avoid rain. In regards to good news, you can alert boardrooms about closing important deals, or mark the end of the school year with a special alert.

Using alerts in these ways can help to normalize the alert system in the eyes of students and workers. If students and workers are used to seeing messages, they will be less shocked by an alert’s appearance, and more ready to act on its contents.

Begin As Soon As You Can

But wait, you might ask, why now? I’m looking into it, but COVID-19 made my organization go remote for the time being.

This is precisely the reason why it is so important to take action. Updating an emergency alert system during an in-person is tricky at best. Adding infrastructure through things like digital signs is easiest to do when buildings are empty.

When people eventually go back to work, they will be worried about possible infection risks. If you’ve taken the time to put a well-thought-out alert system in place, students and workers will be safer, and able to act more quickly if a contamination risk appears.

Conclusion

So if you are looking for a way to set up digital signs and relay alerts through those signs, consider using SureMDM by 42Gears. SureMDM makes it easy to monitor, manage, and secure signs and smart boards (like the ViewSonic ViewBoard) from anywhere.