for emergency planners

We provide specialist digital communications services for emergency planners.

Warning and informing training

Our training services are provided in partnership with Public Networks.

We provide for communications teams within category one responders and other bodies involved in emergency response.

We have developed a one-day initial training package based around Minimum Standards for LRFs and SCGs.  and drawing on case studies from the UK and globally.

This has been delivered with multi-agency LRF Warning Informing Groups and within individual responders.

We also regularly offer open training courses.

Feedback on these courses has been overwhelmingly positive and demand is always high.

All our courses have been developed and are delivered by Ben Proctor MCIPR AMEPS. He has been both a Head of Communications and a Head of Emergency Planning within local authorities. He is also actively involved in a number of online humanitarian response projects. He understands the practical issues within responders as well as having a deep understanding of how digital communications is changing the emergency response environment.

Georgina Stanton, Chair of Bedfordshire and Luton LRF Warning and Informing Group said:

This course was particularly helpful because Ben understood the perspectives of public sector communicators. He drew on lots of case studies that demonstrated how LRF agencies have deployed social media for direct public communications during an emergency, to support media relations and to support recovery. It left all of us feeling somewhat uncomfortable that we’ve not really got our heads around the potential of these channels, but hugely motivated to take forward a common approach.

Planning, validation and review

We provide an emergency and business continuity planning service.

We can develop emergency and related plans for a wide range of organisations and scenarios including Event Management Plans.

We can also provide validation and review of plans to ensure that the impact of digital communications, self-organising groups and the free-flow of information are properly integrated into planning.

We have a particular specialism in developing escalation plans to deliver appropriate levels of resource to meet the communications aspects of emergencies.

The organiser of a Festival for which we developed an Event Management Plan said:

I just wanted to say formally how much [we] appreciated your input to the festival last weekend. It went off very well and we received many compliments about how well organised it was! I hope that you will be around for future festivals and that we will be able to work together in the future.

Exercise design and delivery

We provide full exercise design and delivery services, focussed on the impact of digital communications on incidents.

We are also happy to collaborate to provide social media injects or aspects within wider exercises.

We work in partnership with Helpful Technology to use their excellent SocialSimulator platform which can provide completely secure simulation of online traffic in real time.

We ran Exercise Silverton using the SocialSimulator at BlueLightCamp (a fringe event to the British APCO exhibition and development sessions).

This is a short video demonstrating how Exercise Silverton was implemented within the simulator.