Suggestions for emergency contact broadcasts for work

[Russ Smith]

We had a 9 hour PG&E induced power outage Fri and Sat. This prompted my boss to decide we need some elaborate emergency contact method that he now says is my job to create, by tomorrow. And he strongly prefers I use texting, because "many key employees don't have work email on their smart phone and don't want it on there."

My first problem is if they don't want email my guess is they're going to consider texts intrustive too. The 2nd problem is I have a limit of 10 users per text. The 3rd is I use an Android and not all androids have true "group messaging. That is many you send out a text to ten people, Joe replies, and his reply only goes to you, not the others in the list of 10. IPhones it goes to all 10 by default, some Androids do but not all.

It's pretty clear to me the stock messaging apps make texting far less effective but since people complained about email, I'm stuck trying to make it work with texts. I already tried GO SMS Pro and was very unhappy, it's an addon to a bigger app, that's not free, and is not particularly user friendly, there are entire threads online with people unable to figure out how to add a user or group, and in those threads they can't agree on the best way to add a group. I wound up uninstalling it.

Any suggestions, what do other people do?

 

[Brian]

In the Army we kept it simple: I called my squad leaders, they in turn were responsible for calling the guys in their squads. When everyone was contacted they got back to me and I called up to notify that everyone in the platoon had been notified.

You guys don't have some kind of "chain-of-command" and phone calls are not an option?

 

[Russ Smith]

In the Army we kept it simple: I called my squad leaders, they in turn were responsible for calling the guys in their squads. When everyone was contacted they got back to me and I called up to notify that everyone in the platoon had been notified.

You guys don't have some kind of "chain-of-command" and phone calls are not an option?

That was actually my initial suggestion but people seemed to want to solve it with technology. It's one of those everyone thinks there's an easy way to do it, they just don't know what it is and want me to figure that out.

The dumb thing is I'm the last person that needs to be there it has to be engineers and physicists to restart all the expensive equipment we have and make, my main contribution would be I have a master key to open the door in the event the card reader isn't working due to power outage.

I found it amusing that the Chief Technical Officer decided it was critical to do, and then delegated the actual details to the person who outside of Finance is the least technical person in the company.

 

[HeavyB3]

There are services where you can send out mass text messages designed specifically for this. I'm not sure if your boss is willing to spend money on this though.

http://www.simplifiedalerts.com/

 

[Russ Smith]

There are services where you can send out mass text messages designed specifically for this. I'm not sure if your boss is willing to spend money on this though.

http://www.simplifiedalerts.com/

Thanks I will look at that. They are of course trying to do it for free but that might not be possible.

Today is our first possible test, raining hard, supposed to be one of the bigger storms we've had in 5-10 years so power outages are distinctly possible.