How to Design a Disaster Dashboard

Have you seen our disaster dashboards yet?

If you’ve been looking for a way to streamline information to your local community, you’re in the right place!

Guardian Disaster Dashboards provide a single point of truth for information sharing, which helps you to reduce call times and empowers your local community with informed decision making.

With our dashboards, you can create a localised page where information updates and advice can be shared to the public.

And best of all, all broadcasted information and warnings are streamed from your Local Disaster Coordination Centre—resulting in no duplicate, delayed or different information.

So, if you’re wondering how you can create your own disaster dashboard, follow this guide to learn more and get started:

Step One: Decide on Your Intentions and Usage:

When our clients are trying to decide what to include on their dashboard, they find it helpful to first figure out what their goals and intentions will be for using it.

Here are some common goals our clients set out to achieve:

• Broadcasting critical information and updates to their local community.?
• Presenting a real-time, common operating picture of current incidents/events for the general public, complete with visuals and critical information.
• Reducing overall call times by empowering their local community to make their own, informed decisions during activations.

You might have a goal that’s very specific to your agency or area, and we can usually meet those needs too. For example, we’ve had agencies come to us requesting us to build personalised portals for businesses, or to provide more communication abilities, and we’ve been able to accomplish some incredible things together!

By knowing your goals and intentions, we can then get clear on all the features and coding required to achieve them, which leads us to step two.

Step Two: Decide From the Following Features:

This is a summarised list of the different features we can code into your disaster dashboards. If you want to learn more about each specific feature, head on over to our official site page for an individualised breakdown. But for now, this should help you tick off the essentials:

Conditions

This allows you to display updates and information based on known conditions that impact your area frequently (such as storms, bushfires, flooding or roadwork.) We usually display these first, or as close to the top of the page as possible, for ease of access.

Contacts

This allows you to provide all essential contact information and “get ready” resources in one place when incidents and events occur.

Map

Each dashboard contains a fully interactive map (for spatial awareness) which is synced with your State Government traffic information and conditions (e.g. Live Traffic NSW, Department of Transport and Main Roads, etc.) You can customise map layers based on known conditions that impact your area frequently (such as road closures, storm tides, rainfall gauges, etc.)

Social Media Feeds & Radio

Allows you to display local radio stations and up to 8 social media feeds to assist with response and recovery (such as local schools, police, SES, power, etc.)

Rural Community Connect

The Rural Community Connect portal connects the general public directly with an official, trusted source of information (such as the LDCC) during incidents and events, to help answer questions regarding incident related impacts. (E.g: current fire bans, available fuel stations after a cyclone, alternative routes when flooding occurs, where to get sandbags, etc.)

Business Portal

The Business Portal empowers local businesses to connect during times of emergency to alleviate lack of emergency preparedness, coordinate resources and share support during a disaster.

Opt-in Notifications

Allows members of the public to opt-in to receive email and SMS updates on rapidly changing situations during disaster events.

Step Three: Get in Touch to Request a Quote

All that’s left now is for us to go ahead and build it!

So if you’re ready to reduce call times, provide your local community with real time information updates, and utilise a ton of incredible communication features, then get in touch here to let us know your dashboard needs and we’ll be in touch with next steps.