Educational institutions often experience difficulty in three key areas of business continuity:

• Establishing a Unified Emergency Response Process for Many Potential Types of Events
• Complying with Federal and State Regulations
• Developing Easy to Use and Maintain Communication Methods

Through our experience, the Avalution team has found that educational institutions struggle with these areas due to a lack funding and personnel.  What is required to overcome these obstacles are solutions that are efficient in both effort and cost while maintaining the highest level of effectiveness.  Check out our approaches below on how to reach each of the three objectives with these constraints in mind.

Emergency Response Processes
Educational institutions face many types of threats that may require a response from the staff.  Potential threats range anywhere from a fire or threatening presence on campus to a tornado or dangerous material spill in the area.  Although each type of event requires a different response, they can be built upon the same core communication and decision making processes.  A solid communication process that quickly reaches staff, clients, authorities and the community will provide the initial steps in responding to an event.  Following communication, a decision making process that gathers the best information and brings key personnel together will enable a quick decision to ensure quick response efforts. 

Compliance with Federal and State Regulations
The first step in achieving regulatory compliance is to understand the requirements within each regulation.  Due to recent unfortunate events, our population has been forced to focus on developing emergency response processes to keep our peoples and assets safe.  This focus has fueled the development of more stringent and specific regulations.  While the focus in this area is well placed, many of these regulations overlap, causing confusion not clarity.  Organizations with experience in understanding these regulations, such as Avalution, can provide your team with the necessary guidance regarding areas to focus on and how to meet requirements in a timely manner.   

Easy to Use and Maintain Communication Methods
For any organization, communication is key to ensuring an emergency is managed and destruction is minimized.  Communication methods for educational institutions must quickly reach a distributed group of people including students, staff, parents, emergency responders and the community.  These methods must provide communication in a push type manner as well as a pull.  These methods must also be easy to maintain and cost effective for the organization so that the maintenance of them is not over bearing. 

Due to Avalution’s experience and proven effective approaches, we are able to effectively assist institutions in meeting their continuity needs – be it to safe guard their students and staff or to meet regulatory requirements.  Contact us to learn more about our approach and how we can assist with your unique needs for continuity analysis or planning.