State of Disaster – Coronavirus and immedia response

Team,

We all watched the President’s address to the Nation with nervous and anxious hearts as we begin to see the World disrupted by the Covid-19 virus.

While there is much one can say about the general state of our Nation and the general weakness of our ability to respond to a crisis of this magnitude during an economic malaise, it is important to support and come together on an all-of-society effort to steer us through this moment of testing.

While it may seem somewhat shocking, I believe our government is doing the right thing with the measures they announced yesterday and I am encouraged by the decisiveness and relative speed with which they have acted.

The single most important contribution that we can make as individuals, as a team and as communities, the one thing we are in control of, is ensuring that the spread of this virus is slowed down and buffer the time our professionals have to respond the situation.

This means it will affect our lives in ways that many of us have never experienced, certainly since the start of the democratic era in 1994.

It means not going to the rugby game, or the pub, or mosque or postponing or cancelling long planned and cherished events to ensure we don’t continue to spread this virus.

South Africans have always been a strong and resilient people. We have many advantages of a strong civil society, community organisations and an active and invested citizenry for social justice that will provide a deep well of capacity to deal with this.

What can immedia do and how will we respond?
We all need to be involved in evaluating the various measures of action that we can adopt during this national crisis and the team leads are listening.

We are going through necessary challenges of growth and maturing and the National State of Disaster will be a further test to us to navigate as a business.

We will be heeding the President’s call to ensure our working environment is as safe and sanitary as we can make it during this crisis.

Already you would have noticed from about 10 days ago, hand sanitiser available at reception and extra cleaning and disinfecting regimes being carried out on all surfaces in our offices. We will be looking to see if there is more we can do in this regard.

All non-essential travel by the executive team will be suspended so as to ensure that we do not create new vectors of exposure and to heed the President’s call for social distancing where possible.

We are well prepared at a general infrastructure level for video and audio conferencing meetings in the office but we will be looking at what more may be needed to support members of our team who may need to remote work due to various knock-on effects created by our communal response to this crisis.

We will have much more to communicate once we have consulted with all teams on impact and preparedness.

We need to ensure that as a team we are ready to continue and to contribute what we can to help our clients and our communities prepare for these difficult times.

They will be looking to us for reassurance and support, for skill and creativity and for critical services to achieve their own missions during this time.

Like us, many of our clients will be needing to rapidly accelerate their use of technology infrastructure and Cloud tools to mitigate the disruption. They will be depending on our swift and professional service delivery to achieve this.

At a moment like this, when trusted community engagement and information flow is super-critical to managing events, a product like Fabrik is immensely useful.

Ten days ago I wrote to all our Fabrik clients on how they could use Fabrik to enhance their own response to the emerging crisis.

You should proudly note the dedicated COVID-19 information channels in clients like Paradise FM, Smile 90.4FM and Gagasi FM which they have all spun up, recognising the power of our platform to bring focus and trusted information to citizens. This is being noted by their stakeholders at local, provincial and national government levels.

We anticipate that the use cases for our Fabrik platform in helping them cope with their own mission will be evaluated by a number of potential clients and we will stand ready to respond at speed when needed.

We have a lot to contribute during this crisis and as a team that is proud of our activism, our creativity and our common human bonds, I know we will be a beacon to others in coping during this troubled time.