Share your experience using Alertus Mass Notification

We use Everbridge for various emergencies where we must rapidly notify everyone at a location simultaneously. For example, we once had multiple tornadoes touch down close to one of our sites, so we sent notifications to that site. I believe it was in Oklahoma City.

The company notified the 200 employees working at that location, asking them if they needed any help or if their homes were affected. We quickly got responses back from some people who had damage to their homes, and we assisted them.

Everbridge is an improvement over our previous tool, which was harder to use and took much longer to send notifications. It also had limits on the messaging options for each person. We get more responses because we can quickly send messages to more modalities. We're reaching more people a lot faster than we used to.

I work in security for an aircraft manufacturer, so our mission is to ensure employee safety. With Everbridge, our primary goal is communicating information as quickly as possible to our employees to guarantee their safety. Everbridge has significantly contributed to that objective. We've reduced the lag time between sending notifications out and reduced nonresponse.

Everbridge reduced the time it takes to send a mass notification by about 15 minutes. It isn't a considerable amount, but it can make a difference when there's a potential risk to life safety.

I like how Everbridge can deliver notifications in multiple modes simultaneously. We can set up several emails and phone numbers for each employee so that they can receive information in as many different ways as possible. 

We also use Everbridge Visual Command Center, integrated with Mass Notification. Using two products from the same vendor is ideal because if we used solutions from two separate companies, we would have to build our user database twice. Once we got one tool set up, transferring the information to the other tool was seamless. It's easy and accurate. There are no discrepancies between the two tools. 

We had a different tool before Visual Command Center. It was still getting support, but it was much older. It couldn't handle large amounts of data without slowing down a lot. VCC is a much more modern tool. Things load a lot more quickly, and you don't need to spend as much time waiting for the tool to respond.

We have used Everbridge Mass Notification for about a year.

I rate Everbridge's support an eight out of ten. When we first got the product, the person they assigned to be our customer representative wasn't the best. They didn't respond quickly enough. At times, we felt like we knew more about certain parts of the product than they did. When we asked questions about things they didn't know, they weren't proactive about finding the answers. 

After we complained, Everbridge sent us someone new. He knows a lot more about the product and works late hours to figure things out and get us a response the same day, so our support has improved a lot. We're looking forward to the new capabilities they're developing and seeing where the company goes.

Positive

We had VESTA Communicator and another tool called Beacon Mass Notification System. Our previous tools had limitations on the amount of data they could handle. We could only put in one phone number or modality for each employee. The employee had to have their cell phone on them to receive the notification. 

It required us to update it ourselves, so there was no way we could get buy-in from the employees. I think they had some limited capability at some point toward the end, where users could go in and update their own profiles. However, it was a separate profile that they didn't have to use. Everbridge is connected to the employee profile on Workday that they have to set up when they're hired. 

Employees use their Workday profiles constantly, so they're more likely to keep them updated when we ask them to. The most significant pain point with our previous tool was keeping all the data current, and the modalities were limited. The tool we had before Beacon was a desktop mass notification tool.

Beacon was site-based, so we had no way to contact people who were working remotely. In many cases, the emergencies affected entire areas, so they might be affected if they worked remotely in the impacted city. Everbridge filled that gap, allowing us to reach out to virtual employees and get them to participate and update their data.

It took about three or four months to fully realize Everbridge's capabilities. We had to ensure everyone was onboarded to the system. The employees had to participate. They had to update their Workday profile with their current email and the right phone number before we could realize a nearly 100 percent response. 

We still have issues. There is a lag when people transfer sites, so sometimes employees get notifications when they shouldn't sometimes, or they won't get a notification because they haven't updated their workday profiles.

We realized benefits immediately in terms of adding more modalities for each person, but it took a while to implement the system. 

I rate Everbridge Mass Notification a ten out of ten. 

We use the solution to notify the public about emergencies occurring within our region and other urgent notices, such as disruptions to municipal services. 

Everbridge hosts the platform in the cloud, and we operate it via our browser. We're deployed across a regional district, including rural electoral areas and member municipalities. So, we have both urban and rural end users, around 3400 in total. Around 30 staff within our organization have access to the solution, mainly from the communications department and emergency program, and they are responsible for sending out and monitoring notifications.  

Everbridge allows us to communicate better with the public and ensures the distribution of timely notifications. The most significant benefit of using the solution is that our subscribers are aware of what is going on and can react appropriately, whether to an emergency or a service disruption. An important example is whenever we issue an evacuation order, we can get the notification right to people's phones within minutes, rather than through more traditional means such as radio and websites. 

Regarding contributing to our organization's mission, Everbridge is very useful to our strategic priority of enhancing emergency planning, as it's a tool that allows us to share information with the public rapidly. Communication is one of the first things to fail during an emergency, and Everbridge enables us to manage the communication gap.  

The solution improved our mass notification capabilities, especially with the dynamic location feature; that's an essential one for us and allows us to send messages to relevant people. By avoiding bombarding people with messages that aren't relevant to them, we ensure they remain subscribed and maintain the effectiveness of the mass notification program. Selecting notification targets based on map location is very helpful for us. 

Everbridge Mass Notification positively affected our productivity; it's quick and easy because it simultaneously does text message, email, voice-to-text, etc. We enter the message into one platform, and it can be broadcast in multiple ways very quickly.  

The product saves us time; we don't have to manage and maintain multiple distribution streams, such as phone and email lists. Our users can self-register through the web portal using our link, which is much more efficient than us having to gather that information. We save a lot of time by not having to do the associated manual data entry. Estimating how much time Everbridge saves us isn't easy, but it's around 50 to 60 hours a year.

One of the most valuable features is that we can select specific users to whom we want to message by area. We can draw on the map within the interface and send a message to all our subscribers within that area, ensuring relevant and targeted alerting. This prevents us from disturbing all of our subscribers with messages that aren't relevant to them. 

We have some issues regarding the template layout; we have about 80 templates and must scroll through a long list to find the one we want. It would be good to see subcategories or the ability to filter through the templates somehow.

We've been using Everbridge Mass Notification for a year and a half. 

We've never experienced any downtime, so the solution is very reliable. 

Everbridge is straightforward to scale up or down; it's very scalable from a small to a large municipality or organization. The only issue is when we have more and more templates, as it can become hard to manage, so we want to be able to filter those.

The technical support is good; everyone has been very happy with their responses and materials. There is also an excellent platform called Everbridge University, which offers many learning resources.

Positive

I used a different solution at a previous employer, and it was much less user-friendly in terms of the interface and didn't have social media integration. The last tool was text, email, and text-to-voice calls, but no social media or website posting, and they didn't have an app either. Our users can get the Everbridge app on their phones, and if they travel into an area with a notice, they receive it right away, a capability the previous solution did not offer. 

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but the solution requires next to no maintenance. Occasionally, users call us and ask for their information to be removed from the platform if they don't know how to do that themselves, and that's it.

We have seen an ROI as we use Everbridge regularly. The number of people we can contact versus without a solution like this is where the value lies for us.

Considering what the product offers, the price is fairly reasonable. 

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Before using Everbridge, our main challenge was getting the necessary information out on time. The traditional means of doing so are far less efficient than having multiple forms of communication sent out from one platform, including email, text, phone calls, and social media integration. Everbridge is much more efficient because it allows us to get in touch with our subscribers rapidly. 

My advice to those evaluating the solution is that seeing a real-world application of it is advantageous. It would be good to look into case studies of how organizations are currently using Everbridge, how they've used it in actual emergencies, what their experiences were, and how quickly they could get information into the system and out to users.