Choosing a mass notification system is a complex process. This 11-page expert guide walks you though the things you need to consider as you evaluate systems. All too often, organizations purchase a system without first defining their business needs and mapping out all their requirements. This white paper helps you define those business needs and think through the decision-making process. This enables you to make the best decision when you compare emergency notification systems and choose a system.

1. How to Choose an
Emergency Notification
System
Mission-Critical Emergency Notification

2. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Table of Contents
1. The Requirements
2. The Market
3. Ease of use
4. Administrators
5. Features Count
6. Features List
7. Integration with other
Applications
8. Hosted or On-premise
9. Customer Service and
Support
10. Vendor Trust
11. Resilience
Having requirements
driven by business needs
is crucial.
Let the Business Drive the Process
Like any investment, doing some homework before going out to
market will save you time and potentially costly mistakes when
procuring an emergency notification system. This white paper is
a guide that will help you ask the right questions, and determine
your exact needs. It is designed to help you think through the
process of defining, selecting and implementing a system.
Having a set of initial requirements driven by business needs is
crucial. Without a clear understanding of business needs, you
may make a purchasing decision that doesn’t really solve those
needs. All too often, purchasing decisions are made with only
a small amount of thought given to how the system needs to be
used. This doesn’t have to be a drawn-out process and can easily
be work-shopped to speed the process.
Before you begin to actually choose and review vendors, it is
worth initially reviewing some applications to see whether
there are features that you hadn’t thought about that could be
worthwhile. Bear in mind, though, that these features should
be tested against a real business requirement. It is easy to be
dazzled by a wonderful array of features and lose sight of the
core business drivers. There is a simple test to apply: will you
use it and if you don’t, will it get in the way of the configuration
or use of the notification tool?
Your requirements will then drive you towards a selection
of appropriate vendors based on your initial review. Most
medium-size and larger companies have procurement processes
in place that determine the next steps. However, it is also useful
to consider that there are many paths that the process could
go down, based on how much the system will cost and how
important the procurement is to your organization.
The Requirements
There are a number of considerations that you need to keep in
mind as you develop your list of requirements. The ones that
follow are areas that are sometimes overlooked.
© Copyright 2013-2014, MissionMode Solutions
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3. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Understand your unique needs as an organization
Capable of adapting to
your needs.
Determine whether the system will be needed for only
emergencies or for other uses such as the incident management
team, operational alerts, duty of care, supply chain issues, etc.
You need to define the ultimate business needs that will be
solved by a properly operated system. Will the system save
money, avert risk, avoid regulatory action, or some other
definable benefit? (Showing a positive ROI will increase the
chances of your project being approved.)
The notification system you choose should be capable of
adapting to your needs, rather than you having to change your
own processes.
Understand the geography of your potential
deployment
Where will this system be utilized? Decide if any international
considerations need to be taken into account. Consider how you
would envision deployment—country by country, region by
region or all at once. If the system will be used internationally,
it’s important to select a vendor that has a truly global
infrastructure with points of presence across the globe.
Where will you want
to go after the first
implementation?
Predict the future
Have an estimated plan for where you want to go after the first
implementation. Consider whether use might be expanded into
other business units. Will the ways in which you use the system
change in the future? You don’t want to buy one system only
to find out you have to swap vendors when you implement
a phase two. How will the system fit into your overall crisis
communications needs?
Determine where the contact data will come from
Make sure you have a
strategy to get good data.
Will your contact data come from a central repository or will
the data be entered by users (self-service)? Make sure you have
a strategy to get good data. If the data will come from a central
repository, will the notification system need to integrate with
that repository? Or, will manual data imports be sufficient? If
this data isn’t available currently, define how you are going to
get the data. Vendors should be able to provide best practice on
this, including how to clean the data once it has been initially
gathered.
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4. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Consider who will be launching alerts
Training needs should be
minimal.
What are their user priorities? Will they need to compose
every detail of an alert from scratch or will you want to use
customized templates to reduce human error? Determine
whether these users need access to all possible notification
templates or if they need to be restricted to certain templates.
People are increasingly becoming mobile. Will you need users
to launch and view alert results using mobile devices?
It’s also important to know how often users will be using the
system to launch alerts. This may determine the need for user
training. If a notification system is truly easy to use, though,
training needs will be minimal. Also, people are increasingly
becoming mobile. Will you need users to launch and view alert
results using mobile devices?
Different industries are likely to be driven to different processes.
Highly regulated industries (particularly safety- driven ones)
are likely to establish standard operating procedures around the
use of the notification system and therefore are likely to require
more rigor in their configuration.
Consider who will be receiving alerts
Determine which types of devices they will be using. Will
recipients need to respond to an alert with menu choices, not
just an acknowledgement? Define the groups of users that will
be receiving alerts. Organizations often need to have groups
with membership based on user roles. Also, there is often a
need to sequentially contact members of a group until someone
responds in a certain way. Map out all the ways you will need to
contact recipients.
Will you be able to get IT
resources?
Consider who will be administering the application
Their level of expertise will determine how important ease
of use will be. You need to understand how much time they
can dedicate to managing the system. Will you be able to get
IT resources if the system requires them? Ideally, you want a
system that is easy to manage and doesn’t require IT support.
With some systems, a user with average skills will be capable of
being an administrator.
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5. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Determine the next area within emergency response
that will require software support
Implement where it will
have the most impact.
Establish what executive management thinks of the risk and
investment requirements. Consider what they need to protect
most: supply chain, customer support, agility, revenue,
reputation, etc. You will generally want to implement a
notification system into the part of the organization where
it will have the most impact. This can be followed with
implementations in other areas of the organization. For instance,
if your supply chain is considered vulnerable, then using
notification in that area might be of more importance than
warning staff of an office closure.
The Market
A market focus similar to
your needs.
There are many notification vendors in the marketplace. Identify
those that have a market focus that is similar to your needs.
Determine if they are corporate or public-sector focused (this
will influence whether the company is likely to have a system
that will meet your needs). Do they sell directly or mainly
through channels? If primarily through channels, find out if the
company or channel partner will be responsible for support.
Is their product focused on emergency, operational, marketing
or collections use? Make sure their product strategy aligns with
yours. A different market focus tends to imply features that
won’t be relevant, priorities in serving customers that won’t
suit you, and a product direction that won’t converge with your
requirements.
Don’t restrict yourself
to only the best-known
companies.
As the notification marketplace matures, many vendors are
branching out into other application areas. How will this affect
the investment in their core notification service? Can you
envision using these capabilities in the future?
As you evaluate vendors, your understanding of the business
needs will become crucial, deciding truly what is important and
what is unnecessary and could detract from a timely and cost
effective deployment. Think carefully about the non-functional
requirements such as customer service, support and agility.
Like any marketplace, the most visible companies don’t always
provide these critical aspects as well as they could. Since this
system will be used for emergencies, choosing for these nonfunctional requirements becomes even more critical.
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6. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Spend some time investigating the post-sales support options
and how they will work with your processes. Check that the
vendor will have continuity of people between pre- and postsales so that your relationship and understanding built-up over
the sales process won’t get lost.
Ease of Use
MissionMode’s emergency
notification system is
built for mission-critical
enterprise use, yet it’s
easy to use and manage.
This is generally considered a subjective area of review, but
there are important considerations that can introduce a degree
of objectivity into the review. Users encounter the application at
several levels: configuration and administration; alert invocation;
receiving and responding. What are your expectations of each
user group?
One of the things that impacts ease of use is the complexity
involved with composing an alert. Having all the options on a
single screen is easier than making users click through a series
of screens. You also want to make sure that all the options on
this screen are easily understood.
If users will not be launching alerts on a regular basis, the need
for an easy-to-use system becomes more important. Choose
an application that does not require frequent training to use.
Having regular tests or exercises will go a long way towards
keeping users proficient with your system.
Administrators
Will IT support be needed?
Another important consideration is administration of the
application. Ideally, you want an application that can be
managed by a user with average skills. You don’t want an
application that’s so complex that it requires IT support for
management. Involve a future administrator in the review of the
candidate applications.
Consider whether your administrators will want to configure
the application once and keep the use stable, or whether they
are they working in an ever-changing environment where
they will they need to spend a great deal of time inside the
application. Will IT support be needed or can the application be
managed without IT support?
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7. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Alert Invokers
Easy to use even when
used infrequently.
Decide if your alert invokers will be the same as administrators,
or if they need a simpler user interface. You need to determine
if they can assimilate all the response information in real-time
and at varying levels of detail. How expert do they need to be in
using the application? You should choose a system that is easy
to use even when used infrequently.
Should those invoking the alert be the ones reviewing the
output? If not, then make sure the output can be seen in realtime by more than just the invoker.
Mobile apps enable you to launch alerts from the palm of your
hand. They are very useful because your staff will not always
be in front of a computer. Make sure the mobile app uses alert
templates, which reduces the potential for error.
Recipients
For recipients, consider how often they will be responding to the
alerts: daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. How flexible do you
need the alert messages to be to cater for different use cases (e.g.
emergency versus operational use; or incident response team
mobilization versus all-employee duty of care)?
Different messages to
different types of devices.
Many vendors offer native mobile applications that work on
smartphones and tablets. These mobile apps notify users when
an alert is received and give users a better way to respond to
the message. Will you want users to have such an app on their
devices?
You will probably need to have different messages delivered
to different types of devices in the same alert so that you can
maximize the value of each device to deliver an appropriate
message. Email messages can be of any length, voice messages
should be brief and standard SMS text messages are constrained
by 160 characters per message. As an example, it may not make
sense to send a website address on a phone alert, but it would
be useful to have one in an email or SMS.
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8. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Feature Count
Are the features you define ones that you need now or will
definitely need in the future? Defining too many features
that aren’t necessary will likely require too much effort for
administration and configuration. Defining too few will lead to
user frustration and stakeholder discontent or worse.
Are features truly
necessary to meet a
business need?
Be honest with yourself. Are the features you outline in your
requirements truly necessary to meet a business need, or are
they “nice to have” features that you’ll never actually use?
(Some vendors will try to sell you on slick features that you may
never use and which will only confuse users.)
If you’re looking for a highly configurable system, you need
to factor in the additional administration effort required to
manage the application. If you want to get a streamlined, simple
application, what features will you have to live without? Is the
compromise worth it?
Going beyond simple
emergency notification
Would you benefit from a system that offers more than just a
standard notification system? For example, some vendors offer
incident management applications that are integrated with
emergency notification. Also, there are mobile apps that go
beyond standard alerts by offering messages with components
such as forms, text, photos, documents and GPS location.
Features List
At the high level, the following features can be the beginning of
your list:
• Multi-channel notification (voice, SMS text message, email,
native mobile device notification, pager, fax)
• Multi-channel response to received notifications
• Multiple response options, not just a simple
acknowledgement
• Different messages to each device type in one alert
• Recorded voice alerts (this ensures accuracy that might not
be delivered by text-to-speech)
• Device categorization (such as home or office phones)
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9. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
• Automation rules such as escalation, sequentially contacting
people until someone acknowledges and dynamic teams
based on roles
• Option for leaving voicemail
• International coverage and points of presence
• Selecting recipients on a map by drawing shapes to define
location
• Send follow-up messages based on initial responses
Features driven by
customer needs.
• Target specific locations, such as a campus or specific
buildings
• Conference call and contact center bridging
• Single web page to launch an alert (for ease of use)
• Native mobile apps for launching and responding to alerts
• Consistent user interface between administration,
invocation and receiving an alert
Consider the applications
you need to integrate
with.
You should also have a clear definition of how product features
will evolve. This is not so much a list of features in the pipeline,
but the process by which new features are identified and
incorporated, time-scales between releases, and how specific
customer requests are handled.
Future feature enhancements should be driven by customer
needs. Make sure you check with the vendors and get examples
of how agile they’ve been when working with customers.
Integration with other Applications
Many emergency notification system implementations don’t
need to integrate with other applications, but the most common
point of integration is with a global directory which stores
contact data.
• Will you need to integrate with other applications?
• How easy will this integration be to develop and configure?
• Is an integration necessary or will manual data import be
sufficient?
• Do you have a BCM system and do you actually store
contact information that is current within it?
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10. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
• Should this be the place to gather contact data and teams
from, or is the ‘gold’ source somewhere else?
• What about other operational systems such as Physical
Security Information Management Systems (PSIMS), supply
chain and logistic applications, or help desk systems?
Available even when
your infrastructure is not
functioning.
Hosted or On-premise
Software as a Service has become customary for notification
systems. The extra resiliency provided is often cited as a reason
for this. But what does that mean? Essentially, it means greater
availability of the application, even when your infrastructure is
not functioning.
The vast majority of notification systems are now hosted
by the vendor. This is for a number of reasons including
internal disaster recovery requirements, sharing of resources,
no hardware investment by the customer, and reduced
administration overhead.
Successful
implementation is an
iterative approach.
Partnering... not just
handing you a system.
There may be cases where an on-premise solution is truly
required, but these are uncommon. If an on-premise solution
is required, ensure that the vendor can recommend suitable
resiliency options and show how the primary and back-up
systems are going to be kept in sync.
Customer Support and Service
Effective customer support and service is critical if you are
to continually benefit from the investment in the notification
system. There should be a clear understanding and a proactive
involvement with the vendor to establish short, medium
and long-term goals throughout the duration of the contract.
Successful implementation is normally an iterative approach,
with increasing levels of sophistication reached over the months
and years.
Will the vendor work with you as a partner, or do they just hand
you a system? Proactive support is the key to good customer
service. The vendor should have a complete understanding of
your needs, the ability to deploy resources when needed, and
contact with the customer on a regular basis.
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11. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Tease out the approach to
resilience.
Behind a proactive approach is reactive support. When a
roadblock is reached how does your vendor get around it?
They need to be diligent in not just the first interaction, but in
all interactions until the problem is resolved. Ask the vendor’s
references about their experiences with support.
Resilience
It is important to know whether there is only a single data
center. There is also much discussion about the type of resiliency
offered. Rather than asking what the configuration is, there are
other questions that will tease out not just the technology, but
also the approach to resiliency by the vendor. For instance:
• What happens when a critical failure stops the primary data
center?
• How is failover handled and what happens to capacity?
• How quickly will the full service be restored?
Resiliency encompasses
data integrity and
confidentiality.
• What happens when there is a software fault or data is
corrupted?
• How does the resilient process handle a fault or
corruption—is the problem isolated or propagated around
the infrastructure?
Resiliency should also encompass data integrity and
confidentiality as well. It’s not just about availability; it includes
such topics as information security. Think about your processes
and your attitude towards information security. Audit them
against your internal requirements so the vendor can show that
it can meet the requirement not just now but also into the future.
Vendor Trust
When you purchase anything, you are buying on trust. A
company’s reputation is important in this process. How the
vendor treats the customer throughout the buying process
is important. Often, what happens in the buying process is
reflected, or even amplified, in the implementation and support
process. Check this with references. Confirm that previous
commitments made by the vendor have been kept.
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12. How to Choose an Emergency Notification System
Summary
Speed the process and
keep the momentum.
As in any investment, it is important to understand the business
need. This should drive the decision-making process. But don’t
think that an exhaustive list of features and rounds of corporate
buy-in is the best way forward. Trying to do it in this way will
only lead to exhaustion. Try to use a focus group or workshop
to speed the process and keep the momentum.
Consider not just functional requirements, but also ease of
use, levels of service, trust and reputation. Ensure that your
deployment is iterative so that you can increase your maturity
and success in a managed and quick manner.
Early wins breed success and fuel demand within the organization, much more than trying to define everything in advance.
Incorporate all these points and your investment in an emergency notification system will yield real benefits and real rewards.
Emergency Notification and Incident Management
Manage an
incident in
the palm of
your hand
Contact us to learn
more or schedule a
demonstration.
info@missionmode.com
www.missionmode.com
North America
+1 877.833.7763 (toll-free)
+1 312.445.8811
International
+44 203 021 1036
Smarter Emergency Notification
The Notification Center™ is built for mission-critical enterprise use,
yet it’s easy to use and manage. Intelligent, customized automation
adapts to changing situations and ensures a successful alert.
Features that you won’t find in many other systems include devicespecific alerts and alerts recorded in your own voice.
Incident Management Simplified
The Situation Center™ provides the tools to remedy an incident
better and faster—share information, monitor tasks, track
people’s status, send alerts, access any type of file, and more. It’s a
streamlined virtual command center that enables you to put your
plans into action with the click of a button.
Revolutionary Mobile Communication
EarShot™ goes far beyond ordinary notification. Communicate
with rich 2-way messages using text, forms, photos, documents,
profiles and GPS location. Increase situational awareness, get
on-the-scene intelligence, communicate with field personnel, and
much more.
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