by Stormkestrel The complete platform for immersive crisis exercises.
Create the pace, pressure and uncertainty of a real crisis, giving teams a safe environment to practise the decisions that matter most.
No card required.
Design
Sophisticated scenarios,
simply built.
Most exercise design is document work — a spreadsheet of timings, a folder of injects, a master narrative nobody can hold in their head. Nest replaces all three with one surface you build on directly.
The timeline is the exercise.
Roles run down the side, time runs across. Drop an inject on the rail and it's scheduled. Everything stays legible in a single view — who receives what, and in what order.
A crisis doesn't arrive through one inbox.
Nest carries the channels your people actually watch. No one channel holds the full picture, and the pieces don't arrive in order.
- 01
Email
A chain of messages that keeps building.
- 02
SMS
A text too short to explain itself.
- 03
Phone call
A ringing phone, and a voicemail if they miss it.
- 04
Radio
A voice over the handset, half lost to static.
- 05
Team chat
Half a dozen people talking at once.
- 06
Note
A handwritten note passed across the room.
- 07
Web post
A story, video or thread on a site you define.
- 08
File share
A map, a plan, or whatever they'll need.
- 09
Announcement
A word from exercise control, not the scenario.
- 10
Time jump
Pushes the exercise clock hours or days ahead.
See exactly what they'll see.
Every inject previews in its finished form while you're still editing it — the email as an email, the call as a call, the post on the site it lands on. Flip back to editing and keep going. No exporting, no rehearsal run just to check your work.
Writing the inject The same inject, as it arrives
Media picks up the story
Reports coming in that the cruise liner Gigantic has lost power off New York and is under tow.
Passengers on board say they've been asked to stay in their cabins for now.
Media picks up the story
Jane Doe @janedoe92 2m Reports coming in that the cruise liner Gigantic has lost power off New York and is under tow.
Passengers on board say they've been asked to stay in their cabins for now.
Maggie May @maggielife2 · now
My brother and his family are on board — has anyone heard anything?
Record the call. Rough it up.
Record phone and radio audio straight into Nest, or upload what you already have. Switch on distortion so a call sounds like a call, then layer background sounds underneath and set each one's level. Preview the whole thing before it goes anywhere near a participant.
Over 20 ready-made background sounds
- Emergency Scene
- Helicopter
- Heavy Rain
- Busy Headquarters
- City Street
- Fire Siren
- Inside Train
- Harbour
Build the internet your crisis happens on.
Where the story breaks.
Post to the ready-made sites Nest comes with, or build your own — your intranet, the local paper, a regulator's bulletin — each with its own name, address and look.
Six layouts
- Social
- Microblog
- Video
- News
- Forum
- Bulletin
How far it gets.
Set whether a post barely registers or goes viral. Views, reactions and comments build as the exercise runs, and you decide when it peaks — early, while they are still working the incident, or late, once they think the worst is behind them.
- 12,400
- views
- 860
- reactions
- 47
- comments
Deliver
The scenario keeps moving.
You step in when it matters.
There's nothing to hand out and nothing to time by hand. The run carries itself, so your attention goes where it's actually useful — the room, and the decisions being made in it.
No accounts. No onboarding. No IT ticket.
Nobody joining an exercise needs a Nest account, or even an email address. Send an invite, share a link, or print QR codes to scan — whichever suits the room. They open it and they're in.
-
By email
Send individually, or to everyone at once.
-
By QR code
Download a printable sheet and let people scan themselves in.
-
By link
Copy a participant's link and send it however you like.
Book the hour, not the building.
Participants take part from wherever they already are — their own desk, their own building, their own organisation. No venue to book, no travel to arrange, no date that forty people have to agree on. The multi-agency exercise that keeps slipping down the year can run on Thursday.
- Any location
- Any organisation
- No venue, no travel
- Live presence
- Priya Raman Northfield Water
- Tom Reilly County Fire
- Aisha Bello Borough Council
- Mark Devlin Regional Health
- Ellen Shaw Harbour Authority
- Joe Whitcombe Northfield Water
Multi-team exercises, no extra work.
You build the exercise once. Splitting the participants into teams costs you a few more names, not another build — every team starts from what you designed. After that the clocks come apart: start one an hour late because its room wasn't ready, pause one when a real call comes in, run another quickly through a quiet stretch. No team watches another work, which is what makes comparing their decisions afterwards worth doing.
- Teams in parallel
- Sealed from one another
- Independent clocks
- Team 1 Pause 1:07
- Team 2 Pause 0:49
- Team 3 Play 0:00
Change it while they're in it.
Read the room and react. Write a new inject and send it now — to a team, a role, or one person. Rewrite or pull anything that hasn't gone out yet. Move somebody into a different role, or bring a latecomer in, without stopping the run. What's already landed stays on the record, exactly as they received it.
- Send now
- Edit what's pending
- Delete what's pending
- Change roles mid-run
- Delivered stays delivered
Walk away with the evidence.
When the run finishes the debrief is already written — nothing to collate, and nothing to reconstruct from memory a week later.
-
Participant report
Every inject they received, whether they opened it and how long they took, and what they did about it — including anything they chose to ignore, and the reasoning they gave at the time.
-
Certificate of completion
Something to show for it, listing everyone who took part.
Priya Raman
Communications Lead
Participant report
-
Email Regional Water
09:16 · opened 09:17RepliedHolding line drafted, sent up for sign-off.
-
Web post @northfieldlive
09:24 · opened 09:27IgnoredReason: Not ours to answer — passing to the duty press officer.
-
Radio SITE-2
09:31 · opened 09:31DecidedCanteen closed until the supply is confirmed safe.
Run it as you, not as us.
Put your own name, logo and colour across everything participants touch — their workspace, their emails, their reports. For exercises run on behalf of a client, or where the branding is part of the realism.
Custom branding is arranged per organisation. Talk to us
Experience
If it doesn't feel real,
it doesn't teach.
Once the exercise starts, participants are in a working environment — mail, messages, a phone, a radio, a browser. Each one behaves the way the real thing does, and no single person sees all of it, so the difficulty is the situation rather than the software.
A desk, not a slide deck.
One workspace holding every channel the scenario runs on, with things arriving faster than anyone can deal with them. The layout follows the screen — a full desk on a laptop, the same exercise in a pocket on a phone — in seven languages, including right-to-left Arabic.
- Regional Water 3 09:24 Precautionary notice — Northfield supply Yes — every outlet on the site feed, the canteen taps included.
- Site Manager, Northfield 09:22 Canteen — are we serving lunch? Kitchen needs an answer in the next twenty minutes or they can't prep.
- Amira Osei 3 09:25 Media enquiries Local paper has it already. Two more since I last wrote. What line am I giving them?
- Facilities 09:09 Bottled water — delivery slot Earliest we can get a pallet on site is 14:00. Confirm and I'll book it.
- Environmental Health 08:58 Contact for this morning Duty officer today is Sam Whelan. Direct line below if you need us.
- Group Communications 08:47 Intranet notice — for approval Drafted something short for the staff intranet. Say the word and it goes up.
Precautionary notice — Northfield supply
Yes — every outlet on the site feed, the canteen taps included. Bottled water only for drinking, food preparation and hand washing until we confirm otherwise.
We expect to have confirmed the extent by 11:00. Please direct any press enquiries to our duty press office rather than responding directly.
Tue 14 Oct 09:27 47:12 09:24
The channels work both ways.
What arrives is only half of it. Participants act on what they're given, forward it on to the role it actually belongs to, and write to others on their team. Wherever you've allowed it, they can post to the scenario's own sites as well, and comment on what's already there, for the rest of the exercise to find. All of it reaches the debrief, which shows not just what each person did but whether the picture ever came together.
Ninety seconds in
5/5
A single participant. The first minute and a half of an exercise.
- 09:14 SMS Night Supervisor
Water's wrong on the east side.
- 09:16 Web post @northfieldlive
Anyone else's tap water brown? #northfield
- 09:17 Phone call Regional Water
Missed call · voicemail waiting
- 09:17 Radio SITE-2
Close the canteen or not? Over.
- 09:18 Email Communications
Radio want a statement in ten minutes.
You just read it.
They have to answer it.
That is the whole difference between a plan and a rehearsal — and it is the only thing Nest is built to give you.
At a glance
The full feature list.
Design
- Drag-and-drop inject timeline
- Ten inject types, email to radio
- Every inject previewed as you write it
- Simulated clock and time jumps, any date
- Call and radio audio, recorded or uploaded
- Phone distortion, 20+ background sounds
- Six site layouts
- Custom sites, own name and address
- Posts that go unnoticed, or go viral
- Scripted comment threads
- Past exercises copied and shared between organisations
Deliver
- No participant account or email address needed
- Participants anywhere, in any organisation
- Parallel teams, sealed from one another
- Independent clock per team
- Live presence of every participant
- Injects added, edited or pulled mid-run
- Roles reassigned mid-run
- Several roles per person, or people per role
- Invites by email, QR code or link
- Custom arrival and exit screens
- Your branding throughout (on request)
- Separate designer and facilitator permissions
Experience
- Runs in any browser, laptop to phone
- Every channel in one workspace
- Incoming calls with voicemail, radio with log
- Scenario sites browsed from the workspace
- Injects forwarded and messages sent between roles
- Posting and commenting, where you allow it
- Full-screen exercise control announcements
- Seven languages, including right-to-left Arabic
Evidence
- Participant report, ready when the run ends
- Decisions, forwards and deliberate ignores with reasoning
- Delivery and open times per inject
- Delivered injects kept as received
- Certificate of completion
Nest is built by a British company and hosted in the EU, with no analytics, cookies or tracking anywhere in the platform.
How we handle your dataQuestions about the platform
How long does it take to build an exercise in Nest?
Building an exercise in Nest is a matter of minutes rather than hours. Injects are dragged onto a timeline rather than written into a script document, each one previews in its finished form as you write it, and an exercise you have run before can be copied and adapted in seconds.
Do participants need a Nest account to take part?
No. Nobody joining a Nest exercise needs an account. They can be invited by email, by scanning a printed QR code, or by a link sent to them however you like — and an email address is not required at all. They open the link and they are in the exercise.
Does the number of participants have to match the number of roles?
No. Roles belong to the exercise, and people are assigned to them per run. Somebody doesn't show — give their role to a person already playing. Extra people turn up — put two on one role, and within a team they work it as a single position. Neither needs the timeline touched, and both can be done mid-exercise.
Can several teams run the same exercise at the same time?
Yes. A single run in Nest can hold several teams working through the same scenario in parallel, sealed from one another. Each team can be started, paused, rewound or fast-forwarded independently, so one cohort can be an hour into the scenario while another has not begun.
Can I change a scenario while the exercise is running?
Yes. Nest lets you write and send a new inject mid-exercise to a team, a role or a single participant, and edit or delete anything that has not yet been delivered. Injects that have already reached participants stay on the record exactly as they were received.
Can an exercise be set on a past or future date?
Yes. Nest can display a simulated date and time to participants instead of the real one, so an exercise can replay an event that has already happened or rehearse one that has not. Time jumps placed in the timeline move the whole scenario forward by days, hours or minutes.
What is in a participant report?
A Nest participant report is a personal debrief covering the whole exercise: the participant's roles and team, every inject they received and through which channel, whether they read it and how long they took, and every reply, forward, decision and deliberate ignore they made — including the reasoning they gave at the time.
Can we run exercises under our own branding?
Yes. Nest can carry your organisation's name, logo and colour across everything participants see — their workspace, the emails they receive and the reports they are given. Custom branding is arranged per organisation rather than bought off the shelf.
Your first exercise is on us.
Build it, run it with your team, and keep the report — before you pay anything.
No card required. See pricing