Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released an update to the National Emergency Communications Plan (NECP) – the Nation's roadmap to ensuring emergency communications interoperability at all levels of government.

CISA leveraged the feedback from more than 3,500 public safety representatives from federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial public safety agencies, non-governmental organizations, and other groups in revising the NECP to ensure it reflects the whole community's expertise, experience, and needs.

We sincerely appreciate all who participated in developing the updates, including those who took the SAFECOM Nationwide Survey, volunteered to serve on working groups, provided comments during the national feedback period, and attended the webinars.  The breadth of public safety’s participation makes the NECP a key component of our nation’s preparedness.

The updated NECP:

Builds upon the key concepts and principles of the 2008 and 2014 versions of the NECP;

Revises the vision statement to address secure information exchange and adds the public to acknowledge their increasing role in emergency communications;

Emphasizes the importance of strategic and lifecycle planning and sustainable funding;

Promotes the importance of evaluating and documenting lessons learned from training and exercises;

Underscores the need for coordination of communications assets and capabilities at incidents and planned events;

Emphasizes technology and infrastructure lifecycle management and focuses on effective and interoperable information sharing; and

Adds a new goal focused on cybersecurity risk management, the mitigation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, cyber hygiene minimums and funding.

Please plan to attend one of CISA's 60-minute webinars, where we will discuss the updates to the NECP and answer questions.  Additionally, please pass the webinar information along to other colleagues.  The dates are as follows:

Wednesday, October 2, 2019, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm ET

Tuesday, October 8, 2019, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm ET

Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET

To participate use: webinar link (for visual):  https://share.dhs.gov/necp2019 and dial-in (for audio):  (800) 381-7839.

To review the updated NECP visit:  https://www.cisa.gov/necp or for questions about the NECP, contact: necp@cisa.dhs.gov.

CISA is requesting your assistance in helping spread the word about the release of the NECP, available resources, and information on three upcoming webinars to discuss key updates.

The below-linked Social Media Toolkit includes scripted messages that you, association staff, and state officials can use to communicate the release of the NECP to your stakeholders via email or social media.  The messages in this toolkit can be used by your organization as is, or you are welcome to tailor them to your audiences.  If you have any questions, please reach out to us at necp@cisa.dhs.gov.

2019 NECP Social Media Tool Kit v2 (MS Word, September 24, 2019)

Thank you for helping CISA communicate the importance of the NECP.