Everbridge helps Dentsu International to enhance critical event management capabilities

Dentsu International is an advertising and digital marketing organisation. With a clear passion for making the world a safer place, Dentsu is the only advertising holding company to be a member of RE100, a global initiative bringing together the world’s most influential businesses committed to 100% renewable electricity, which they achieved for all their global offices in 2020.

“Our Resilience team has an ambitious target to reach 90% of staff and secure a 70% response rate when any critical event occurs. During a June 2020 earthquake in Mexico, our team reached 100% of the 400 employees affected with a 70%+ response rate in 20 minutes with the help of Everbridge.”

Global threat landscape

“As another example, during the early stages of COVID-19 in the Republic of Korea, our local management team saw the potential for a spike in cases and swiftly created a daily pandemic check-in to continually monitor the health and work arrangements of its employees. This poll has occurred every day for 7 months and is still receiving a 90%+ response rate,” said Adam Barrett.

Dentsu needed capabilities to consistently communicate with people and protect assets

Navigating an increasingly volatile and uncertain global threat landscape, Dentsu needed capabilities to consistently communicate with people and protect assets across its global operations when critical events occurred. Incidents such as the London Bridge attacks, civil unrest in Hong Kong, and natural disasters in Australia, the Philippines, and South America highlight the growing need to protect people in all locations.

Missing enhanced capabilities

Existing tools were used to send communications to employees, but were missing enhanced capabilities such as:

• Holistic reporting capabilities to show whether messages were being received and responded to.
• Distinct emergency communications, distinguishable from ‘ordinary’ communication tools.
• Internal collaboration tools to give security teams a holistic risk picture and plan the correct response.
• Streamlined structures and processes in place to help reduce the time of incident

Furthermore, there was a requirement to not only provide risk intelligence, but to automate the validation of hyper localised incident alerts and their issuing. When it came to wider security incidents, there was a desire to introduce further automation and efficiencies in escalation.

Critical event management

Dentsu International deployed Everbridge to provide a step change to its critical event management capabilities. With Everbridge, Dentsu began leveraging tools that provided effective communication capabilities, robust visibility, operational efficiency, and real-time intelligence, including:

• 20+ new incident templates to prepare for the most likely critical events, such as extreme weather, natural disaster, contagious diseases, terrorist attack, and IT incidents.
• Streamlined processes across email, voice messaging, SMS, and the EVBG app starting from least intrusive/ personal to most, sending 3 cycles in 4 hours to maximise the potential for employee response.
• Internal collaboration tools and reporting for a proactive resilience practice, when incidents occur within a 1-mile radius of each business location, automated alerts sent via the Everbridge platform inform the appropriate local responder to assess the danger, take action, and communicate back, while informing a central team.
• Wider security alerts and communications to the appropriate regional security team depending on the time of day, that ultimately escalate right through to the leadership team if required. As a result, the Mean Time To Respond (MTTR) to these alerts has reduced to near guaranteed minutes.

Minimising personal inconvenience

Dentsu launched the service with an extensive internal staff awareness campaign which included direct communications from its leadership teams and utilised everything from townhalls and digital posters to pop-up games and competitions. The campaign familiarised employees with the service, how to update their contact details and reaffirmed their control of their personal data.

Dentsu launched the service with an extensive internal staff awareness campaign

The campaign raised awareness of the new security procedures, why they’re important and what staff should do when they receive an emergency communication. Events in Hong Kong (HK) are one testament to the impact Everbridge and Dentsu’s partnership continues to have on employees. At the beginning of the protests in June 2019, the HK incident team swiftly utilised the multi-modal capabilities of the Everbridge platform to communicate immediate changes in working arrangements to colleagues, thus minimising personal inconvenience, disruption and ensuring their safety.

Monitoring local cases

Similarly, in January 2020, the HK team informed colleagues of adaptations to working arrangements as the Coronavirus pandemic took hold. In March 2020, when infections were spiking and little was still known about the virus, the HK team moved quickly as part of a global recovery strategy to monitor local cases, change office access arrangements, provide clear guidance on next steps, quarantine protocols and further protect its employees - while other businesses were awaiting respective local governments for guidance.

Dentsu International was recently recognised in the Everbridge Impact Awards 2020 as the winners of the best overall response to COVID-19 category. This forward thinking organisation has a clear passion and purpose for achieving meaningful progress for its clients as a force for growth and good, and is gaining a reputation among its employees, partners, and peers as a pioneer.