How to Set Up an Emergency Phone Tree

Because the best laid plans can go astray, plan for life's unexpected adventures. Your child's school may have a system in place for disseminating official school information, but follow the steps below to set up a phone tree to communicate last-minute changes to your child's extracurricular schedule.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Address Books
• Answering Machines
• Telephones
• Bulletin Boards
• Cellular Phone Batteries
• Cellular Phones

1. Decide what constitutes an emergency. You'll probably want to activate your phone tree for circumstances such as cancellation of a scheduled event or a change in the time or location of an event.

2. Determine who needs to know the information your phone tree will communicate.

3. Make a list of those names and collect contact information. Get two phone numbers (home, office or cellular phone); at least one should have an answering machine or voice mail function.

4. Choose who will sit on top of the tree (the team coach? the band director?). Work with that person to decide how many "branches" you need.

5. Recruit volunteers to work the branches, and assign each of them a specific group of "leaves." Be sure your branches have all the necessary contact information for their leaves.

6. Test your tree at least once before you need it, and fix any broken connections.

Tips & Warnings

• It may be helpful to actually draw the tree and write in branch and leaf names. Check your tree against the master "needs to know" list to make sure no one is overlooked.
• A phone pyramid is another way to visualize this concept. The person sitting on top of the pyramid phones the two names "below" him; then those two people phone the two (or more) people below them; and so on.

[busygirl23]

on 4/1/2009 Another service that improves on the old fashioned phone tree is One Call Now (http://www.onecallnow.com). They provide customized packages for religious organizations, sports teams, government agencies, schools, and more. When you're ready to send a message, you just call a 1-800 number, record your message, and One Call Now will dial thousands of numbers within minutes. The best part is, you can check online and see who answered, who got a voice mail, and who never picked up. My kids soccer club uses One Call Now. It's great to get a phone call as soon as the fields are cancelled! It saves me the drive to find out for myself.

[thechtman]

on 9/12/2008 One problem with a phone tree is when one or more people in the tree are not available. This can cause delays in delivering important messages to everyone in the organization. An alternative that should be considered, is a messaging service like the one that Freedom Message provides (see www.freedomessage.net). There are a number of companies that provide messaging services that deliver messages reliably and efficiently.