Emergency communications planning: before the crisis happens

Why you can't get sign-off during a fire

The most dangerous assumption in emergency communications is that you will have time to set things up when the emergency arrives. You won't.

In the first hours of a genuine emergency — a wildfire, a flood, a public health crisis, an infrastructure failure — every senior official is simultaneously managing the situation, fielding media calls, coordinating with other orders of government, and communicating with first responders. The communications team is stretched thin. Procurement approvals move slowly under normal circumstances; they often stop entirely when the people who must sign them are in crisis mode.

If you don't have a pre-signed contract, a pre-approved call list, and pre-authorized spokespeople in place before the emergency, you will lose days — sometimes the most critical days of the entire event — trying to get approvals while the situation escalates and your residents wait for information.

The good news is that this is entirely preventable. Emergency communications readiness requires only a few hours of advance planning — and it costs nothing to have the infrastructure in place if you never need to activate it.

What to have ready before an emergency

Converso recommends that every government client with a realistic emergency exposure — which includes virtually every municipality, regional government, First Nation, healthcare authority, and provincial ministry — have the following in place before they need it:

• Pre-approved call list: A resident or constituent list that has been validated, cleaned, and loaded into Converso's platform — ready to dial within hours of an activation decision. The list should be refreshed at least annually or after major population movements (post-census, post-disaster, after significant boundary changes). The list does not need to be "activated" — it simply needs to exist in a ready state.
• Pre-approved spokespeople: A list of officials who are authorized to host an emergency telephone town hall without requiring a new sign-off each time. This typically includes the mayor or chief elected official, the emergency management director, the medical officer of health, and relevant regional ministers. Each spokesperson should have a current, tested dial-in number on file.
• Pre-signed master services agreement: A standing contract with Converso that covers emergency activations. This removes procurement from the critical path. When an emergency is declared, an authorized official can activate services with a single email or phone call — no new contract, no purchase order, no vendor registration process.
• Pre-agreed activation protocol: A written internal process that specifies who can authorize an emergency activation, what the chain of approval looks like, and how Converso will be notified. This should be included in your organization's Emergency Management Plan or Business Continuity Plan.
• Test event: At minimum one test telephone town hall conducted before an emergency, so spokespeople are familiar with the format, staff are trained on the process, and any technical issues are identified and resolved in a non-emergency environment.

Activation timeline: how fast can Converso go live?

With a pre-signed contract and a pre-loaded call list, Converso can go live with an emergency telephone town hall in under 24 hours from the moment an activation request is received. In most cases, the timeline looks like this:

• Hour 0: Activation request received from authorized official (email, phone, or emergency hotline)
• Hour 1–2: Converso confirms call list is current, identifies spokesperson dial-in number, and confirms event parameters (date/time, format, language, expected audience)
• Hour 2–4: Platform configured, call list loaded, test dial-in conducted with spokesperson or communications director
• Hour 4–8: Pre-event notification sent (SMS, robocall, or email blast to residents advising them to expect a call from their government)
• Within 24 hours: Live telephone town hall conducted with simultaneous outbound dialing to the full resident list

For clients without a pre-signed contract, the timeline extends by 24–72 hours to accommodate procurement and contract execution. This is the difference between reaching your community on Day 1 of a crisis or Day 3 — a gap that matters enormously when residents are uncertain, frightened, and consuming inaccurate information from unofficial sources.

Fort McMurray wildfire: 17 events in 30 days

The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire was the costliest natural disaster and second-largest mass evacuation in Canadian history, forcing more than 80,000 people from their homes within hours. In the weeks that followed, the Government of Alberta needed a way to reach evacuees — many of whom were scattered across dozens of reception centres and temporary accommodations across the province — with consistent, accurate, unfiltered information about the recovery effort.

Converso produced 17 telephone town hall events over 30 days on behalf of the Alberta government. These events gave evacuees direct access to provincial officials and allowed them to ask questions and receive answers in real time — something no press release, website update, or media advisory could replicate.

The events were hosted by senior provincial officials including ministers, deputy ministers, and emergency management directors. Alberta Minister of Municipal Affairs Danielle Larivee described the rationale directly:

Key lessons from Fort McMurray that inform Converso's emergency readiness program today:

• Volume and frequency matter: A single town hall doesn't sustain trust over a multi-week emergency. Evacuees needed regular updates as the situation evolved — daily in some weeks. The ability to run events at short notice, back-to-back, without rebuilding the infrastructure each time was critical.
• The call list is your lifeline: The Government of Alberta had a resident and evacuee list that could be dialed. Without that list — and the pre-existing contract to use it — the first event could not have happened in the timeframe it did.
• Unfiltered is the point: Press releases and government websites filter information through institutional processes. A telephone town hall lets residents hear directly from the official responsible, ask questions, and receive real answers. The minister's framing — "unfiltered" — is exactly right.
• Geographic flexibility: Evacuees weren't in Fort McMurray. They were in Edmonton, Calgary, Lac La Biche, and dozens of smaller communities. The telephone format reached them wherever they were, without requiring them to travel to a town hall venue they couldn't get to.

COVID-19 government response: 40+ events across Canada

The COVID-19 pandemic tested emergency communications infrastructure at every order of government simultaneously. From March 2020 onward, Converso produced more than 40 government telephone town halls for federal, provincial, and municipal clients as officials struggled to communicate public health guidance to communities that were frightened, isolated, and in many cases unable to access physical public meetings.

The breadth of that experience revealed several patterns that now inform Converso's standard emergency communications recommendations:

• The clients who performed best were the ones who were already set up: Municipalities and health authorities that had previously run town halls with Converso — even for non-emergency purposes — could activate COVID response events within 24–48 hours. Those who had no prior relationship with Converso took a week or more to get procurement and legal approvals in place, losing critical days during the most acute phase of the pandemic.
• Residents showed up in enormous numbers: COVID telephone town halls consistently achieved higher participation rates than typical civic engagement events. People were home, they were scared, and they wanted direct information from officials. Calls to communities of 20,000–100,000 residents saw peak live audiences of 3,000–15,000 participants.
• Questions were substantive and searchable: The question queue summaries from COVID events became internal intelligence for government communications teams, revealing which public health guidelines were most confusing, which rumours were circulating in specific communities, and which populations had the greatest information gaps.
• Bilingual delivery was non-negotiable: For federal and New Brunswick clients, simultaneous French-English delivery was required from the first event. For municipalities with significant newcomer populations, translation into additional languages — Punjabi, Tagalog, Mandarin — became a priority within the first weeks of the response.

Running large-scale events: what changes at municipal scale

For regional governments, health authorities, and large municipalities, telephone town halls can mean dialing hundreds of thousands of households simultaneously. Converso has placed close to 400,000 outbound calls in a single Government of Alberta event. At that scale, the operational requirements are substantially different from a smaller event:

• Infrastructure capacity: Simultaneous outbound dialing to hundreds of thousands of numbers requires a platform purpose-built for high-volume concurrent calls — not a standard business conferencing tool. The platform must sustain call quality and screener operations while dials are still going out.
• Queue management at scale: When thousands of people answer simultaneously, participant queue management becomes a real-time logistics challenge. Converso's producers manage participant flow, question screeners, and poll launches while the host is live — without the host needing to manage any of it.
• Post-event reporting for large events: A large-scale event generates a substantial data set. The post-event report includes geographic participation breakdowns by postal code, enabling regional government to identify which communities participated most and which may need targeted follow-up communications.

What officials need to be on the pre-approved list

Building a pre-approved spokesperson list before an emergency is straightforward — but it requires thinking through who will actually be available and credible for different scenarios. Here is a standard framework for a municipal or regional government:

• Mayor / Chief Elected Official: For events affecting the entire municipality. Provides political accountability and signals the gravity of the situation. Should be comfortable with unscripted Q&A.
• Emergency Management Director / CAO: For operational updates — what is being done, what residents should do, what resources are available. Typically better for the "how" questions, while the mayor handles the "why" and the political context.
• Medical Officer of Health: For public health emergencies, water advisories, or events with a health component. The MOH carries scientific credibility that elected officials cannot replicate.
• Communications Director: Should be on every event as the internal coordinator, managing the screener briefing and the post-event debrief. Not typically a public spokesperson but essential to the event functioning well.
• Subject-matter experts: For specific emergencies — the Director of Water Services for a boil water advisory, the Fire Chief for a wildfire, the Director of Infrastructure for a bridge closure. Include 2–3 likely scenarios in your pre-approved list and identify the relevant expert for each.

For each pre-approved spokesperson, Converso needs on file:

• Name and title
• Direct dial phone number (cell preferred for emergency situations)
• Backup contact number
• Language(s) in which they can present
• Any technical requirements (hearing loop, captioning, specific audio setup)