Complete Guide to using Boardingware’s Emergency Rolls for Crisis Management

In today’s day and age, speed of communication during response to a Crisis is critical. So why do we see school’s still using ring binders for their emergency response plans?Over the years, Boardingware has developed much further than being a ‘convenience’ or ‘time saving’ tool. Schools now rely on our system for campus safety, it provides a single source of truth for understanding where your students are.The ability to account for where people are at any given moment -- has become our greatest strength. It sounds relatively simple, but it’s actually incredibly hard to get right.

The old way

A school can have hundreds of students, staff, support staff, contractors and parents on their campus throughout the day. In most cases this is tracked through clipboards, visitor sign in systems, spreadsheets, attendance and much, much more.However, 99% of the time, there is no place for faculty see who’s there and who’s not. The information usually exists but it sits in different silos all over the school which makes the visibility across campus virtually non-existent.In an emergency, this is particularly problematic because making sure that everyone is accounted for is the number 1 priority. To counter this - most schools have some form of procedure that sits in a ring binder that they put in every room on campus.This is archaic.If you’re able to collaborate in real-time with someone half-way around the world using Google Docs -- then why do we still use paper to track people on our school campuses?

The New Way

Due to the technology that Boardingware was built on - our system operates in real-time like you’re using Facebook or Google which is important, because you can be sure that any information that goes into the system, is instantly accessible to your colleagues, no delays, no requirements to ‘refresh the page’ -- it’s instant.It's also completely mobile because using a computer during an emergency is highly unlikely and probably a worse solution than using a clipboard. Therefore we focused on making sure the mobile experience is simple and effective.[caption id="attachment_2589" align="alignnone" width="1280"]

Above: Emergencies can be handled in real-time so you and your colleagues can account for students effectively.[/caption]During a Crisis it’s paramount that you effectively account for your people as quickly as you can, which means you must be able to trust the information you have in your hands. Currently schools don’t trust the information they have, or they don’t have the information at all which is why they default to using a blank paper list of students to account for.When using our Emergency Rolls feature, you can create emergency procedure templates for different scenarios which can be set up with the help of your safety team.These templates determine the following

1. Who will receive a notification. - students, staff and even parents.
2. Via what method - sms, email and push notifications
3. What exactly you would like to tell them.
4. Who else will be invited to account for your students.

Once the templates are set up, you simply initiate an emergency procedure and the process then follows like this

1. All of your people receive a notification with what to do.

2. You and your colleagues are left with a simple roll to go and quickly account for everyone you’re assigned to. If people aren’t right there in front of you, Boardingware uses all of the previous data to help you understand where people were last accounted for.

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Above: Students that aren't there will have the last place they were accounted for on their name.[/caption]

3. If you have students that are still missing, you can quickly contact them right from your screen.

4. Once everyone is accounted for you can close off the roll and that information will be available to review via the students profile.

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Above: A student's profile viewed from the staff web-app where you can see a record for the last emergency procedure. This features who accounted for him and and at what time.[/caption]Even though I hope school’s never need to use this part of our product, it’s a hugely important piece that schools can take advantage of in order to streamline crisis response, enhance security and give parents peace of mind.If you’d like to learn more about Boardingware’s emergency roll functionality, Click here to request a demonstration and one of our solution specialists will be in touch. Or if you have any questions, use the comment section below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.