Disaster management tools: Indian Red Cross Early Warning System

Early warning systems

Early warning systems are crucial in humanitarian aid, providing timely information and enabling proactive measures to mitigate the impact of disasters. They save lives, minimize losses, and improve response coordination amongst relief agencies.

These systems foster engagement, enable effective monitoring, mitigation and response efforts, and ultimately help empower communities. Research from the World Meteorological Organization emphasizes the urgent need for early warning systems as climate change leads to more frequent, severe, and unpredictable hazards. By implementing these systems, aid organizations can substantially mitigate the effects of climate events.

In our recent deployment in India, the monday.com Emergency Response Team (ERT) focused its efforts on Assam State, a region that is significantly vulnerable to floods. The ERT partnered with the Indian Red Cross - Assam State Branch and Google, in their ongoing project focused on flood early warning alerts via the Flood Hub platform.

Flood Hub's platform was tailored to provide regional early warning information and notifications, while monday.com's platform, through its product integrations, was used to translate those early warnings into actionable tasks, relevant workflows, and an automatic mass communication system.

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The ERT's support included:

1. Enhancing the application of Google's early warning system by integrating an organisational workflow to manage activation and response, generating actionable tasks to the Red Cross team members and volunteers.
2. Integrating a centralized notification and communication solution using monday.com and Twillio's native integration, sending automatic mass notifications to volunteers.
3. Enhancing the digital transformation process for the Assam branch of the Indian Red Cross, supporting its entire emergency operations cycle - from preparedness through response, and recovery.

The Flood Hub provides users with locally relevant flood data and flood forecasts up to 7 days in advance so they can take timely action. It is a visual, easy-to-use resource that displays local riverine flood maps and water trends and gives real-time flood forecasts and alerts based on Google's AI models and global data sources.

Thanks to these digital tools, the Indian Red Cross can better manage its response, prepare its volunteers, and execute its emergency response plans.

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See how this integration works!

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Organizations digital transformation: a real opportunity

After several years of working in the field, assisting aid organizations in their digital transformation, we know the importance of digital solutions for effective and efficient humanitarian response. Having the right tools can easily facilitate better communication, enhanced coordination, and life saving information sharing among various stakeholders, including civil society, local communities, NGOs and government agencies.

Digital platforms also provide instant channels for disseminating critical information, such as emergency alerts, safety guidelines, and recovery updates, ensuring that affected people receive timely and accurate information.

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Ensuring a successful digital transformation

The ERT's goal is to provide every organization operating in the emergency space with the best possible resources to respond to disasters in a more efficient and effective manner. We offer:

• Pro bono tools and on-site deployment: our team will be physically present to aid and facilitate the implementation process, providing the monday tools.
• Ongoing remote support: after our on-site implementation, we support your organization's transformation until we fully transfer ownership to the operational team.
• Workflow characterization: ERT will jointly tailor the workflows to suit the organization's needs.

Need our pro-bono help? Check your organization eligibility today, we are here to support you along the way!