User guide

Filling in a premises profile

What each field is for, and why a thin profile produces a thin procedure pack.

For: Anyone who can see the premises · About 5 minutes to read

The premises profile is not paperwork for its own sake. Everything in it is woven into the procedures that get generated from it — the exits become the evacuation routes, the assembly points become where people are sent, the contacts become who is rung. A profile with only a name produces a pack that says, honestly, that it does not know your building.

The name and the number of people present at once are required. You can save a half-filled profile and come back — nothing is lost and the pack can be regenerated as often as you like.

Illustration. The profile form. Exits, assembly points and contacts are line-based: one per line, and for contacts, three parts separated by vertical bars.

The fields, and what each one changes

Field	What it does	If you leave it out
Name	Identifies the premises everywhere — the dashboard, reminders, the roll-up, the pack's cover.	Required. Nothing can be saved without it.
Type of premises	Chooses the flavour of the procedures: who leads, what attendees are called, and a line written for that setting. A church and a pub get different words.	Falls back to general wording for other premises.
Capacity	Your reasonable estimate of how many individuals may be present at the same time. Shown against the tier guidance on the premises page, and quoted in the pack.	Required — the form will not save without it.
Address	Appears in the communication procedure as the address to give when you call 999.	The procedure tells you to add the full address, rather than leaving a caller without one.
Exits	Listed in each of the four procedures, and the routes the evacuation procedure has in mind.	The procedures say to add them and regenerate, rather than inventing a route.
Assembly points	Listed in each procedure as where people are sent, in the order you list them.	Same — named as a gap rather than filled with a guess.
Key contacts	Become the call list printed in each procedure.	The procedures have nobody to ring, and say so.
Layout notes	Anything the procedures should reflect: rooms that lock, corridors, spaces away from windows. Printed in every procedure, and used by invacuation to point at the best places to shelter.	Left out of the procedures, and invacuation asks you to add them.

The three line-based fields

Exits, assembly points and contacts are typed as lines rather than as separate boxes, so that adding a fourth exit does not mean finding an add another button.

Exits and assembly points: one per line, written the way somebody standing in the building would say it.

Main front doors to the street
Side corridor exit to the lane
War memorial on the green (primary)

Contacts take three parts separated by vertical bars — Role | Name | Phone:

Chair of trustees | Alan Whitfield | 07700 900105
Caretaker | Jean Okonjo | 07700 900184

A note on what you are storing

Key-holder names and mobile numbers are personal data, and the people in that list are usually volunteers. Two things follow, and neither is onerous:

Tell them they are in it. They are entitled to know, and they will want to know that a phone number is held somewhere that says it is for an emergency call list.
Keep it to what the procedure needs. A role, a name and one number. Home addresses, personal email addresses and anything about somebody's health do not belong here.

What we do with it is set out in the Privacy Policy; your organisation is the controller of the contents of its own records, and section 12 of the Privacy Policy explains what that means in practice.

Changing a profile later

Edit it whenever the building or the people change, then regenerate the pack — the existing pack is a snapshot and does not update itself. Old versions are kept, and any version in force at some point in the last 2 years can be downloaded from the version history, so you can show what the procedures said at the time somebody adopted them.

If a premises closes or is sold, archive it rather than deleting it: the records stay and stay exportable, it stops counting against what you pay for, and it disappears from dashboards, reminders and roll-ups. See Running an estate.