The BCI has published its annual Emergency and Crisis Communications Report, which explores how organizations manage this essential area.
Key findings in the survey-based report include:
Senior leadership plays a key role in emergency communications
Internal emergency communications are primarily led by top management, while communications teams lead external emergency communications.
The top three functions that survey respondents said would be in charge of internal emergency communications are:
1 – Top management
2 – Communications
3 – Business continuity
The top three functions in charge of external emergency communications are:
1 – Communications
2 – Top management
3 – Public relations
The majority of organizations have formal emergency communications plans
86.8% of survey respondents said that their organization has a formal emergency communications plan in place. 76.2% said that this could be activated within 30 minutes and can be escalated to top management within the same time period.
72.4% of respondents stated that their organization had activated its emergency communications plan in the past 12 months.
Respondents reported high success levels for emergency communications
70.5% of respondents said that their emergency communications reached the required response levels either ‘always’ or ‘often’, but where response levels were not achieved, the main reasons were:
- Lack of response from staff or recipients (60.7%)
- Inaccurate staff contact information (42.2%)
- Switched-off devices (39.9%)
Training and exercising
Regular training and exercising is conducted, with 81.3% of respondents saying that their organization carries out at least annual training about emergency communications programs; and 82.7% of organizations conduct exercises at least once a year.
This report is sponsored by Everbridge.
