Streamline Blog

The need for special districts to plan for unforeseen events has become more obvious than ever before. Whether it’s a threat from a pandemic that forces people to work from home, a catastrophic fire that wipes out entire towns, or the possibility of riots and looting that may affect your ability to operate, special districts need to be ready to face the unknown.

Response is defined as the actions taken to save lives and prevent further damage in a disaster or emergency situation. Response is putting preparedness plans into action. Response activities may include damage assessment, search and rescue, fire fighting and sheltering victims.

Preparedness takes the form of plans or procedures designed to save lives and to minimize damage when an emergency occurs. This is a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluation and improvement activities to ensure effective coordination and the enhancement of capabilities to prevent, protect against, respond to, recover from and mitigate the effects of natural disasters, acts of terrorism and other man-made disasters. These activities ensure that when a disaster strikes, emergency managers will be able to provide the best response possible.

In this post we’ll go over the basics of the mitigation phase and share resources to help you perform a Risk Assessment for your district. This may sound like a big complicated topic, but we're going to walk you through it step by step. We even have a template you can use to complete phase 1.

In today's Going Paperless webinar, we discussed a variety of tools that can enable special districts to collaborate and work remotely. We covered cloud-based systems for communication, meetings, project management, and more.

Learning technology can be such a long and dedicated process that it’s easy to assume everyone has the same knowledge you do. Things that a lot of techy folks think are basic might in fact be known by only a lucky few. From things like shortcuts that make browsing the internet easier, to how to select and manipulate large amounts of files at once, to “hidden” computing features like copy/paste. These tricks and tips aren’t obvious, but are really helpful for technology users to know.

One of our favorite customers (ok, you’re all our faves, of course) reached out with an amazing guerrilla marketing story: Fire chief Ben Stange of Polk County Fire #1 decided to purchase a few hundred yard signs for his community that read, “Stay Home. Save Lives.” He knew this was a chance for his department to stay visible and connect with the community during a time when people were feeling really isolated. But how to distribute them during Oregon’s stay at home order?

We’ve been working to help so many public agencies figure out how to hold remote public meetings using Zoom that we decided to host a webinar and write our own guides. The first one was on Zoom Webinar, this series is focusing on using Zoom Meeting without the Webinar add-on. Between watching our webinar and downloading the guide, you'll have this in no time!

We’ve been working exclusively with special districts across the country for over five years now. One of the reasons we chose to serve special districts is because it’s a highly collaborative, peer-driven space. We also believe very strongly that as the most local form of government, special districts represent the true expression of a healthy democracy.

We just finished up our second quarterly Streamline Live! webinar, where we announced some exciting new products and handed out quarantine-themed customer awards. We also held a mock public meeting (wearing ridiculous wigs, of course) to try and decide which remote meeting option was best for our imaginary district.