What information should you give your emergency contacts?

Tell them they are your emergency contact

This sounds too obvious to state, and it is skipped constantly. People add a contact in a settings screen and never mention it. That person then receives an unexpected automated message and spends the first critical minutes deciding whether it is a scam.

Tell them explicitly, tell them what app or service might contact them, and if possible show them what the message looks like.

What they need to know about you

Your emergency contact may end up speaking to a paramedic, a hospital, or a police officer about you. What can they answer?

• Your full legal name and date of birth
• Known allergies, especially to medications
• Regular medications and roughly what for
• Significant medical history: heart conditions, epilepsy, diabetes, anticoagulants
• Your doctor’s name or practice, if you have a regular one
• Whether you have any advance directive or organ donor decision recorded

Not all of this needs to live in their head. Knowing where to find it is enough — a note on their phone, or simply knowing that your own phone carries a medical card.

What to do when they receive an alert

Agree this in advance, because it is not obvious. A reasonable default sequence:

1. Try to call you. Many alerts are accidental, and the fastest resolution is you answering.
2. If there is no answer, try again after a short interval and send a message. A text may get through where a call does not.
3. Note the coordinates if the alert contained them, and the time it arrived. Do not rely on the message still being there later.
4. Contact anyone else likely to know where you are.
5. If there is genuine reason for concern, contact emergency services and give them the coordinates and the time.

Agree what silence means

This is the most useful thing to agree and the least commonly discussed. If you are hiking and say you will message when you reach the car, what should happen if you do not?

Pick a specific time, not a vague one. "If you have not heard from me by 8pm, call the number for the local mountain rescue" is actionable. "Let me know when you are back" is not a plan.

Equally important: send the all-clear. Most check-in systems fail because people forget the boring half of the protocol, and a contact who has twice been worried unnecessarily reacts more slowly the third time.

Choosing the right people

A few practical criteria that matter more than closeness:

• They answer their phone, including from unknown numbers
• They are not always in the same place as you — two people in the same car is one point of failure
• They can act calmly and make a decision without you
• At least one is in a time zone where they are likely awake
• They know your other contacts, so they can coordinate rather than duplicate

Two or three is the right number. One is fragile. Ten means nobody is certain they are the one who should act.