Is Your Community Prepared? Emergency Communication Plan for your HOA

To prepare your community for an emergency, it's essential to have a communication plan in place.  

This communication plan should include how you plan to keep employees, board members, residents, vendors, and any other parties informed. When you communicate well with residents, it gives them comfort and peace of mind, while allowing you to build trust with them.  

In this post, you’ll learn about what your emergency community communication plan should cover. We’ll also be referring to the experiences that Karl Kuegler (Imagineers Management) shared in his talk “Recover and Respond: Emphasizing Community after a Disaster” at the 2022 .

1) Internal communication

Whether you are a board member or a manager, training is a critical step in the community’s emergency plan. Karl Kuegler explained that while individual staff may not have direct experience handling an emergency, a plan should draw on the skills of upper management and others who specialize in emergency management. It’s equally important to document the training process:

Practice Drills

A practice drill helps staff and board members understand the steps they need to take in an emergency. Be sure to outline the steps, how often the drill should take place, and who has been trained.

Manager-Board Internal Communications

It’s vital for board members and managers to communicate regularly before, during, and after an emergency. The Board has a duty to make sure the community is safe, but it’s also important to understand that they may be stressed too. Even more so, if they live in the community. Set up a meeting with the board to discuss their current operations and any gaps you can help to fill. That way, they can perform their duties, remain calm, and help keep everyone safe.

Communicating with Local Agencies

Keep a list of who staff needs to contact during an emergency. This includes local emergency response teams, Red Cross and other nonprofits, insurance agents, lawyers, vendors, etc. Karl Kuegler talks about how it is important to identify yourself as part of the HOA board or community management company when speaking to the emergency response teams. That way, they know that you are there to support residents and are not getting in the emergency response team’s way.

Communicating with Vendors

The community’s vendors are also a critical part of your emergency response or restoration plan. Before an emergency, make sure you have the most up-to-date contact information for your vendors. It’s also critical that your vendors’ certificates of insurance and other licenses are up to date. Having this information at hand keeps your community, employees, and vendors safe while reducing any potential for liability if someone is injured. A vendor management app will allow you to keep track of vendor information such as contacts and license expiration dates.

During a community’s restoration phase, it’s also important to keep vendors informed of the current situation and what they can expect when they get on site. This includes any safety hazards, building/community access, etc.

Store your training documents online

Once you have the document(s), store it in an online repository. This could be your company’s Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or an HOA software with document storage included.

2) Educate residents on emergency preparedness

Educate residents on the weather-related emergencies that are likely to occur in their area. It’s essential to communicate with residents throughout the year, not just during an emergency. You can provide helpful tips and resources to residents based on the season as well. Weather-related events a community could experience include hurricanes, tornados, damaging winds, flooding, large hail, fires, blizzard, or snow.

You can distribute resources through a document-sharing and communication platform. A document library allows you to organize files, set permissions, and notify residents. Through a communication platform, email residents about best practices to stay safe.

3) Build and maintain a resident contact database

Building and maintaining a database is a crucial part of your plan to keep residents informed before, during, and after an emergency. This includes a resident’s email, phone, address, and their emergency contacts. In the Stonewoods Condo fire incident, the Imagineers team printed two copies of the resident contact information. They gave one copy to the emergency responders at the scene. They also added the fire chief, police chief, mayor, and other local community contacts in their community management software so they could receive messages too.

How to collect and verify contact information:

• Web Portal – As residents move in (or on a frequent basis), encourage them to update their contact information and emergency contacts in a web portal.
• Paper Forms – Keep paper forms at the office for residents to fill out and then update your database.
• Identify invalid contacts – Make sure your communications platform gives you a way to identify invalid contacts. 
• Postal mail – Send postal mail to residents on a regular basis asking them to confirm their contact information. Phone numbers and emails can change over time, so it’s vital that you have the most up-to-date information.
• Post emergency verification – When Karl Kuegler’s team sent out their emails, they would view the delivery and open status. If a resident did not open the email, they would call them to ensure they received the message and re-confirm their contact information.

4) Assign roles and responsibilities

To keep your message accurate throughout an emergency, it’s important to assign roles and responsibilities. Assign one person the responsibility of sending out messages. It could be confusing to your residents when there are multiple people or board members sending out messages.

Your communications platform should provide a way to set roles or different levels of access for different people. Managers should be able to assign those who are in charge of communications a messaging admin role. 

5) Identify communication methods you'll use

Before you send messages to residents, you need to figure out which communication methods you’ll use. It’s important to refer to the community’s CC&Rs and local/state regulations to understand what the requirements are. Understanding your resident’s demographics and their preferences also helps you build trust with them. For example, elder demographics may prefer to receive phone calls over text and emails.

Most effective tools during an emergency

During an emergency, phone calls and text messages are the most effective tools to use. They are fast, have high open/listen rates, and are interruptive.

What your communication platform should include

• Multiple communication options – Keep your residents informed through many ways such as phone, email, and text.
• Resident preferences – Send messages in residents’ preferred communication method and language.

Other communication methods and when to use them

• Social Media – During an emergency, one should avoid posting emergency messages on social media. Because it is an interactive platform, it can cause panic, leading to misinformation and even liability. However, you can use social media to post helpful tips on how to prepare for an emergency.
  
• Email – Email is often not the best tool to use in an emergency because people may not see it immediately. The average open rate for emails is 21% compared to text, which is 99%. However, email can be a powerful tool to prepare residents for an upcoming weather event or days/weeks after an emergency.

6) Careful and compassionate messaging

An emergency situation is a very stressful time for residents. It’s important that your message is timely, accurate, and understanding of your residents’ situation. It’s best to have an extra set of eyes to review your message before sending it out. In the Stonewood Condo emergency, multiple staff in the organization reviewed and modified messages before sending them out.

When you’re ready to send a message, be sure to create a template for it. That way, you can save time when an emergency arises.

7) Fast and reliable communication technology

Fast and reliable communications software is essential to keeping your residents informed before, during, and after an emergency. Throughout this guide, we referred to how technology is critical to every aspect of your emergency communication plan. As a recap, your communication software should have the following capabilities:

• Fast messaging – Send thousands of messages out within minutes.
• Multiple communication methods & preferences – Having multiple ways to communicate helps you to reach residents more effectively. See if your communication platform enables you to send a combination of phone, email, text, and PDF letters. Your residents should also be given the ability to choose their language preference.
• Accurate contact information – Your software should track invalid emails and text numbers so that you can correct the contact information when necessary.
• People and unit-based Distribution groups – Creating contact lists ensure that you send messages to only those who need it. Your software platform should enable you to create any combination of people and units in your distribution group. Also, your software platform should maintain the list automatically so that when residents move in or leave the community, the list will automatically be adjusted without any effort on your part.  
• Contact database – Allow your residents to self-manage their information through a portal so you always have the most up-to-date information. Through such a platform, your residents should be able to manage their own information like:
  • Contact information and language
  • Emergency contacts or guests
  • Other occupants in their unit
  • Alternate contacts
  • Alternate addresses
  • Community directory settings (where they can also view other residents’ contacts)
  • Pets
  • Insurance
  • Unit documents

Conclusion

Handling an emergency situation such as a fire or weather-related event is difficult as you’re dealing with very human emotions. However, communicating with care and at the right time can provide a little bit of peace of mind in a stressful situation. Developing an emergency communications plan will keep your staff on the same page, as well as keep your residents and boards informed.

Read the full blog post on our website: https://www.pilera.com/2022/06...