At 10:33 a.m. PST on July 4th, 2019, the city of Ridgecrest was hit with a large 6.4 earthquake. This would be a foreshock to two more massive earthquakes measuring magnitudes of 5.4 and 7.1, which would hit the 27,420 Ridgecrest residents on July 5th.
It was during these events when Ridgecrest Regional Hospital found itself as the beacon of help and information for the community. Not only did the team need to move quickly to treat the injuries sustained during the earthquakes, but they had to quickly get information out to the public regarding the state and capabilities of the hospital during this time.
A local emergency can happen at any time.
It’s times like these when the hospitals in the affected areas become even more important to the community they serve. Depending on the nature of the emergency, residents in these areas may be turning to the hospital for emergency treatment, as well as for information about the situation and how it’s affecting the hospital and the community.
Through Scorpion, your website has the technology and the people available to help you get your message out to the community during these stressful times.
Posting Your Emergency Banner with Help
On every new Scorpion website, we include the option for an emergency banner to be added quickly to the top of every page of the website. This banner is specifically shown in a separate color and above the rest of the site so that your patients and visitors can quickly find the information they need.
The banner can be deployed at any time by logging into our content marketing system (CMS) platform and adding your content to the emergency banner section. This content will be automatically added to every page of the website. And, if changes are made to the content, those changes will also be automatically pushed to every page on the website, saving time for you and your team.
If you are unable to get to a computer to make this change, no problem. Simply send the request to the Scorpion team and we will prioritize adding this content to your website.
Best Practices for Using an Emergency Banner
Your emergency banner is intended to grab the visitor’s attention and to give them the information they need as quickly as possible. Because of this, we specifically design our emergency banners to use a separate color from your brand, and we keep the content as concise as possible.
If there is more information that needs to be conveyed, there is an option to add a link that will allow the visitor to navigate to a page dedicated to the emergency information.
When To Use the Banner
You can use your emergency banner at any time, but we caution you from overusing this tool. Doing so may cause your website’s recurring visitors to disregard or glance past this information.
Below are some situations where you may want to deploy the emergency banner on your site:
- Earthquake
- Wildfire
- Hurricane
- Flood
- Blizzard
- Snow storm
- Tornado
- Mudflow
- Landslide
- Avalanche
- Cold wave
- Heat wave
- Tsunami
- Volcano
- Phone outages
- Power outages
- General evacuation
Updating Your Community About Coronavirus
Today, the medical information many people are seeking are updates on Coronavirus, news on how Coronavirus is affecting their community (including their local hospital), and what residents can do to protect themselves.
We are encouraging all of the hospitals and health systems we work with to add information regarding the Coronavirus to their websites, and emergency banners are a great way to make this information more visible and helpful to local residents.
If you are a Scorpion client who wants to learn more about the emergency capabilities on your website, please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager.
Or, if you are not a Scorpion client and you just want to know about more best practices for hospital websites, contact us today. We will be happy to help!
