BCI Emergency & Crisis Communications Report 2024

BCI Emergency and Crisis Communications Report 2024

The BCI is pleased to mark the tenth anniversary of the BCI Emergency and Crisis Communications Report with the release of this year’s edition, which examines how crisis communication methods have evolved over the past decade in response to changes in working habits, the impact of new technologies, and shifting privacy policies. The report also identifies best practices for deploying an emergency or crisis communications plan and considers how communication protocols can be improved.

The changing landscape – SaaS usage at an all-time high

The last four years have seen a concerted shift in emergency and crisis communications strategies in the wake of the pandemic and the impact of remote/hybrid working. Organizations are still tackling the challenges of alerting a dispersed workforce, as well as ensuring that training and exercising is engaging and effective.

One of the notable shifts in the past ten years is the type of technology employed for use in emergency and crisis communications. A decade ago, use of the cloud was limited with in-house server technology and installed software being the choice for most organizations. However, with increased security protocols now attached to cloud solutions, coupled with faster and more reliant network capabilities, organizations are shifting their software – and increasingly the infrastructure – into the cloud. The trend continues with this edition of the report highlighting how the use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in emergency communications is at an all-time high.    Of those organizations using an emergency communications tool, 85.7% are using SaaS either as a pure SaaS solution (61.1%) or as a hybrid SaaS/installed solution (24.6%). The popularity of SaaS solutions lies in the ability to be deployed across multiple platforms at once, as well as being hosted remotely in the cloud — a particular advantage for those organizations with staff working remotely. However, the hybrid option of having a SaaS solution integrated with existing incumbent technologies is becoming increasingly popular as organizations seek to adjust their toolkits to keep existing software (which is familiar to everyone in the organization) but layer a new SaaS solution into it to provide enhanced crisis capabilities.

What matters to organizations

While most organizations were positive about their emergency and crisis communication tool, there is an increasing level of dissatisfaction (up to 20.3% from 16.2% in 2023). Reasons highlighted include the need for better integration with other alerting scenarios (48.3%), lack of functionality (31.6%), and not being able to afford their ideal solution (19.3%).

In terms of functionality, the report evaluates which features are most significant to organizations. Collaborative functionality is now considered the most important feature in an emergency communications tool. 54.6% of respondents deemed it a critical requirement. This demonstrates how collaboration at the onset of a crisis is crucial, in order to ensure that the right people are informed, the correct information is obtained, and, where appropriate, management are consulted first.

Activating the plan

There has been a five-percentage point increase in the number of organizations that have activated their emergency communications plans, with almost 65% of organizations (2023: 60.0%) activating plans between one and five times in the last year. An extreme weather event was the most popular cause of activations at 48.3% which, given the increasing severity of climate-related events, is likely to remain the case over the mid- to long-term.

The speed of activation is paramount for a successful emergency response and most organizations can activate their plan within the first hour of an incident. Furthermore, 70% of activations met the organization’s expected response level. As ever, the human factor is a critical element in the success of emergency response and, as with last year’s report, the primary reason given for a plan failure was a lack of response to emergency messages by recipients. However, this is an area that can be improved through thorough training and exercising programmes. Indeed, this tenth anniversary report highlights a positive 10-year trend in the number of organizations engaging in regular training, which has now reached a record high at 79.3% (up from 68.4% last year).