You might have heard about Trello as a useful tool to manage projects and teams, but did you know it has equally proved useful for a different purpose in Belgium’s emergency management circles?
We can’t stress it enough: crisis management activities of all sorts can hardly be called strategic without proper crisis data monitoring. In most cases, online and offline interactions constitute or at least amplify the malicious event in the first place. Learning about the ins and outs of these conversations by capturing relevant data from various data streams has turned out to be an important strategic asset to handle emergencies and crises alike. Taking into account all the different media and platforms used these days, however, is really hard. We are very aware that the mapping of all external drivers at stake during a crisis, such as external perception, opinions, images and videos (to name a few), is a daunting task.
It is clear that in the short timeframes at our disposal, creating order in this chaos requires a simple and intuitive tool. This tool should allow an information analyst to structure the captured data, turning these unusable raw data streams into proper crisis intelligence. Our team has experienced at first hand that the results of such information management efforts prove to be invaluable to crisis teams in virtually all cases, not only in terms of communication but as much in how the right strategic operational and policy level decisions are made. We love our advisors to be empowered during the heat of the moment by being able to interpret all the needed information in the blink of an eye. For all these reasons, the online tool that is most suitable for this job, for us, is Trello.
For the second issue of the brand new Be Prepared magazine on emergency management in Belgium, I had the opportunity to illustrate how Trello can be used to build a realtime and interactive information product aimed at improving crisis management and crisis communication.
View article (Dutch)
Type: PDF, 830Kb
Language: Dutch
Source: Be Prepared, issue 2/2017
This article is republished on our blog with permission of the editor Die Keure Publishing.
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More details on how I can use Trello?
After reading the Be Prepared article I guess you’re probably eager to see Trello in action within the crisis communication field. To find out more I can recommend this short video news report (Dutch) about the international recognition awarded to Team D5 and this article covering Trello usage more in detail as it was done during the #BrusselsAttacks.
About the author
Tim is an adviser, researcher and developer active in crisis management, crisis intelligence, sentiment analysis and crisis simulations. He’s involved in several innovative activities such as the EU-funded E2mC project. At PM Tim co-developed the Zombie Game and developed the CIP Simulator.
