By Ben McCarthy, co-founder of BridgePacks and LionbridgePR
I got the call at 2:30 in the morning. A plane had crashed with the loss of all on board. As I powered up my laptop on the kitchen table I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The lead story on the BBC News website, and on every other global news site, featured my client, a Middle Eastern airline. Their plane had crashed at an airport in Russia and the story was accompanied by grainy but unmistakable CCTV footage of the second the 737 hit the ground at enormous speed. It's a moment I'll never forget, and one for which you might think you can never prepare.
For the communications team who took the call, it was horrific. They would often have coffee with flight deck and cabin crew as they reported for duty, and now feared that some of their friends were among the dead.
Sometimes the shock that follows such a tragic event can cause paralysis in those who need to respond. But this team had prepared and rehearsed for this moment. I had spent more than two years with them, making sure they had planned meticulously for just such an event, one we all fervently hoped would never happen.
We had prepared checklists, divided up roles and responsibilities, run desktop exercises and ensured our communications channels were ready to go 24/7. So they simply followed the plan, and we were able to respond with compassion, clarity and care for those affected.
I have handled many crises for a wide range of clients. One thing this tragedy confirmed was just how essential it is for teams to have a plan in place: a step-by-step guide that helps them respond in those first surreal moments.
This is why, when we heard about Martyn's Law, which requires venues including schools to have procedures in place for a terrorist attack, we felt it could only be a good thing. The thought that goes into the four procedures (evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication) means that a senior team will be led by its own plan rather than by instinct in the moment, which is not always reliable.
For businesses which already have safety or risk managers, or business continuity teams, the Martyn's Law requirements should be fairly easy to absorb into their day-to-day responsibilities. For schools it is another matter. When we read the Department for Education guidance, we could easily see how anyone who had never been asked to write something like this before might find it overwhelming.
We have been writing plans for businesses for over 20 years, and that experience tells us it will take a great deal of work for a school of any size to produce the required procedures from scratch.
That's why we built BridgePacks. It takes the required information from an individual school and, in about fifteen minutes, turns it into a complete set of documents which can be used to make sure everyone knows how to react in the event of a terrorist threat.
This gives a school a strong starting point from which to run regular desktop exercises and drills, and to make changes if any issues come to light. BridgePacks is designed so that we do the heavy lifting and the school can concentrate on the fine tuning, and on making sure everyone knows exactly what to do. Whatever the organisation, aviation or education, the surest way to a calm, professional response is to follow the plan.
