How to create a Mass Notification Service for disaster recovery (for less than £50)

We're constantly telling our customers: "Communication is the most important aspect of continuity." During a disaster, communicating with your workforce in a timely and accurate manner is vital to minimising disruption.

The biggest objection we hear is cost. And when you consider that a mass notification service for even a relatively small organisation can add up to thousands of pounds per year, that isn't an unreasonable objection.

However, we're very strong believers that no one should be priced out of continuity, and so we've designed a very simple Mass Notification Service that you can create by using a combination of existing free or freemium tools, for less than £50 per year.

What you'll need

• A workforce with mobile phones
• An hour of free time to configure your service
• A Twilio account from which to push notifications via SMS or voice
• Excel or Google Sheets to manage and organise your list of contacts
• A Zapier account to connect your recipient list to your Twilio account

How much it'll cost you

Twilio
You can sign up for a Twilio account for free. You pay only for the telephone number (from $1 per month) and the number of messages sent:

SMS pricing: $0.04 per SMS (up to 140 characters)
Voice call pricing: Costs per minute from $0.04

Excel & Google Sheets

Office 365: Starts at £3.10 per user, per month
G Suite: Starts at £3.30 per user, per month (there is also a free legacy edition with some reduced functionality)

Zapier

Zapier free tier: Free for use of up to five 'Zaps' (individual two-step workflows)
Zapier paid tier: Starts at $20 per month with access to advanced features and app integrations

For an organisation with 100 users, using a free Zapier and Google Sheets account, the total cost is under £50 per year (assuming that your setup includes 1 telephone number, 5 different alerts sent to each user,1 test and 1 actual DR invocation).

How to set up your Mass Notification Service

1. Start by creating the worksheet that will be used for the notification. Give this sheet a name that describes who the message is for, such as: "Company-wide notification". Create additional tabs for any additional groupings.

Tip: Also create a tab with a list of any pre-prepared messages you might need to send. This can speed up the process of sending messages during an incident.

2. Set up a Twilio Account at https://www.twilio.com/.

3. Create a Zapier account at https://zapier.com/.

4. Make a "Zap" and create the trigger (either Excel or Google Sheets)

 

5. Select the trigger. To make it easier to see what has been changed, we usually opt for "New Row".

 

6. Create the action. Select Twilio and opt to send either an SMS or an automated voice call.

 

7. Set up the action. Choose the numbers you will be sending the message from and to. Here you can choose the column that the number will be selected from in Excel / Google Sheets and you should see your own number here. Add the message that you want to send (copy from the pre-prepared messages in your spreadsheet).

8. Name your zap and make it live. Zapier will now check the worksheet every 15 minutes for any newly added rows.

 

This is a very simplified guide to setting up your Mass Notification Service. To read the full, step-by-step instructions, download the guide here.

Additional features & advancements

Using just these three tools, there are a number of other features you can create. At the time of writing, Zapier connects over 500 apps, so you can also plug these messages into any other communications platforms you use, such as Slack or Yammer.

In addition, mass notifications aren't limited to emergency situations. They can be useful for any situation when usual means of communication aren't available, such as:

• Communicating with the IT team when doing maintenance on systems
• Organising teams working on off-site projects

What are the alternatives?

Traditionally, many companies would use a call tree - a series of phone calls cascading down a predetermined hierarchy, i.e. one person calls two people, who call their individual team leaders, who call their subordinates. This limits the amount of calls each person in the organisation needs to make.

Whilst cheap and easy to set up, being a manual process means that if the chain is broken it could leave large sections of your business in the dark.
Another method is to have a centralised phone line for staff to call in a disaster to hear a pre-recorded message that is updated throughout the incident. Whilst this minimises the time spent by the EMT communicating to the team (so they can spend more time fixing the problem), it also requires immediate and constant updating every time there's a change in circumstances.

Download your free copy of "Build your own mass notification service for disaster recovery" here.

If you'd like to discuss anything you've read here, drop us a line at info@databarracks.com or give us a call on 0203 177 1910.

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