Case Study: VIC SES

About SES

Victoria State Emergency Service Authority (SES) has served Victorians with distinction since 1975. It continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of communities and the emergency management sector. As a 5,000-strong volunteer-based organisation, Victoria SES is committed to working with every Victorian to achieve its corporate vision, “Safer Communities – Together”.

Victoria SES is the lead agency, and has a legislated responsibility for the hazards of flood, storm, tsunami, earthquake and landslide emergencies. They are the largest provider of road crash rescue services in Victoria. They also provide a support role (for example, search and rescue) to other emergency service agencies, including Victoria Police.

Website: https://www.ses.vic.gov.au/

The Challenge

VIC SES had a survey/forms tool running on its internal network that was no longer supported by the vendor. SES wanted an alternative that was easy to use, and would give them the ability to easily collect data from their users. They primarily needed to be able to create surveys and audit checks.

VIC Government regulations require that their data be retained within Australia and not hosted overseas — a requirement that most survey products in the marketplace can’t meet. This policy provides better privacy management and eliminates the threat of “snooping” by foreign agencies and hackers.

In addition to these requirements, VIC SES needed an intuitive, easy-to-use system for 100 or so employees who regularly create surveys.

The Solution

In 2018, they selected Snapforms as an online forms tool to solve those challenges. VIC SES created numerous forms of the following types:

• Responses to questions sent to volunteers, employees, and the general public
• Audit checks on divisional command centres, incident control centres and mobile field operations vehicles
• Surveys for customers, volunteers and former SES members

Snapforms is an Australian-based form builder, meaning that all the data collected through the forms is stored on Australian servers. This completely solved the challenge VIC SES had with adhering to government regulations about data protection.

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