Everbridge Mass Notification Reviews

I use Everbridge Mass Notification to reach out to our staff to let them know there is a potential event or to check in on them after an event such as a hurricane or snowstorm to make sure that they are okay and whether they are able to work. I also conduct a semi-annual exercise to validate that we can reach them and have their contact information.

I used Everbridge Mass Notification during a hurricane to determine the impact on staff and how many of them were able to work, would not be able to work, and if any of them potentially needed assistance.

Everbridge Mass Notification has an easy-to-use interface. I have access to a number of templates that are available to pull in and use with little modification needed. I am able to get messages out to the staff quickly during an event.

The easy-to-use interface of Everbridge Mass Notification stands out to me mainly in its layout and the speed with which I can get in and get a message out. The templates are useful in that I can view them ahead of time and then make any tweaks to them. When something does come up, I am not starting with a blank piece of paper.

Everbridge Mass Notification has positively impacted our organization by providing our staff with a sense of comfort, knowing that we have the ability to reach out to them and keep them in the loop or provide warnings to them about potential events or check in on them. They know that we can contact them and also that we are concerned for their safety.

I could integrate feeds if I use a different tool such as a data miner for alerts about events to make sure I can pull that information automatically into Everbridge Mass Notification.

I have been involved in business continuity for over 25 years.

I used a cloud deployment at my previous organization.

When I used Everbridge Mass Notification, I found it to be accurate and reliable.

My advice for others looking into using Everbridge Mass Notification is to know what your plans are for using the tool and make sure everyone has an agreement on that. Identify who your users are going to be and make sure that you let all the staff know how the messages are going to be coming and what the sources are, such as the phone numbers and email addresses, and let staff know they need to add them to their devices. Otherwise, they may end up going into spam and they would not get the actual message during an event. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for Everbridge Mass Notification is crisis communications and emergency notifications during potential crises impacting the organization.

During a recent wildfire activity in Northern California, I used Everbridge Mass Notification to reach out to leadership and notify them of the event. I used Everbridge Mass Notification to identify the impacted employees in the potentially impacted area. Once we identified the number of employees, we sent them a communication to ascertain their status and followed up with additional communications to provide support or address any additional questions leadership may have.

Everbridge Mass Notification allows us to geolocate employees that are located remotely throughout the rest of the United States.

Among the best features Everbridge Mass Notification offers are timely and effective communications, allowing us to reach impacted employees or the entire employee population of the company, depending on the scenario. The mobile application that comes with our setup is extremely effective, allowing two-way communication, image sharing, location status, and more.

The two-way communication and image sharing capabilities of Everbridge Mass Notification allow employees to provide more than just an acknowledgement of the message I send. It allows them to respond with additional free-form text. Image sharing allows them to send an image of the surroundings if an event might involve some sort of physical impact to the region or the area around them, and it helps identify what may be challenging them at the moment.

The features of Everbridge Mass Notification are extremely easy to use, and I have trained non-crisis type people to use and send messages through Everbridge Mass Notification. It is extremely easy, extremely effective, and the employees that are receiving the messages are very pleased with the simplicity of the system and the ability to respond to messages.

Everbridge Mass Notification has been an extremely effective tool for leadership to understand potential impacts to employees located throughout the United States since all of our employees are 100% remote. Anytime there is an event that we are notified of through Everbridge Mass Notification's risk intelligence or threat intelligence feature, we are able to identify what employees might be impacted, and if we need to send messages, we can. The employees appreciate the ability and the frequency in which leadership reaches out when there may be impacts to their personal situation or work situation.

I do not know that there is too much improvement that I can offer at the moment regarding Everbridge Mass Notification. It is one of the best tools in this market space across the globe. Everbridge obviously has high-profile large corporate clients, including government organizations in the US and other countries. They provide an opportunity and an avenue for clients to submit feedback, and in the Everbridge community that we all as clients have access to, we learn from one another. If we all have a similar challenge we would like to see Everbridge improve, the Everbridge community, the company, and their project teams look for that feedback and then they try to implement that in their project plan for the following upcoming years.

I think Everbridge is very lean and very forward-leaning in its approach to how to serve its clients and is continually taking the feedback from those clients and implementing those as quickly as possible. I do not know that there is anything that I can see they need to change at the moment, but if there is, then I know that they will address it as soon as possible.

I have been using Everbridge Mass Notification for approximately eight or nine years.

Everbridge Mass Notification is stable.

There has been no hallucinations, no issues, and no challenges to the data outputs of Everbridge Mass Notification so far, highlighting its accuracy and reliability.

Everbridge Mass Notification is extremely scalable.

The customer support for Everbridge Mass Notification is best in class.

I did not previously use a different solution before implementing Everbridge Mass Notification.

I have seen a return on investment with Everbridge Mass Notification. There is no change in employee need; in my career space, we are already short-staffed. Everbridge Mass Notification allows us to fill in that gap. It has kept us from having to hire more. Metrics-wise, our response rates and effectiveness to respond to crises are near immediate with the capabilities of the tool, so we have not suffered any major issues from incidents that have occurred because of our communications capabilities with Everbridge Mass Notification.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Everbridge Mass Notification was as expected. This is the third time that I have implemented Everbridge Mass Notification, and I was well aware of the implementation costs and pricing. It was as I expected. It is a little bit more than other providers in this space, but Everbridge Mass Notification offers more than any other provider in the space, so I have expected that, and it is as I would plan to spend.

I evaluated other options before choosing Everbridge Mass Notification. Those options include OnSolve and Mir3.

Employee satisfaction has come through our overall employee satisfaction metrics that are taken by human resources periodically throughout the year, and Everbridge Mass Notification has been highlighted as one of those factors where it implies leadership caring about the employees, which is one key metric. As far as response rates, we are above 90% for response rates within a given time, which is well above industry averages that might be in the 80 to 85%. Our employees are very responsive. They are not clicking on this as spam or phishing. They understand the intent behind the messages, including our testing.

I rate Everbridge Mass Notification a nine on a scale of one to ten.

I chose a nine because it is near the best. I am sure there might be room for improvement, and the only reason I probably did not give them a ten is they are one of the more expensive tools, but you do get a lot of features and a lot of capability and capacity with the tool. A ten would be given only if it probably cost less, but again, you get what you pay for, and it is a great tool.

Everbridge Mass Notification is leading in the market with their governance and security protocols and controls around this space.

Everbridge Mass Notification is deployed in my organization using a private cloud, not on-premises.

We use Amazon Web Services as the cloud provider for Everbridge Mass Notification.

I did not purchase Everbridge Mass Notification through the AWS Marketplace.

I have no improvements needed for Everbridge Mass Notification that I have not mentioned previously.

My advice for others looking into using Everbridge Mass Notification is to understand all of your use cases to determine what level and amount of features you desire from Everbridge Mass Notification.

I used Everbridge Mass Notification for multiple reasons, with the main reason being mass notification. Whenever we were conducting business continuity planning events, I used it for sharing information across the leadership team about the event and sending travel notifications to employees working in a certain region or during any kind of critical events.

I also used it for mapping geopolitical maps and geostatistical maps so that whoever was in that time zone or in that area would be notified about the event.

Everbridge Mass Notification was even used to help individuals who were stuck in some areas. If an employee had Everbridge Mass Notification installed on their phone and needed emergency help during critical events, we would provide multiple options for what kind of help they needed and would assist them based on their requirements until they reached safer zones, returned to their office locations, or got back to their homes. These were the unique ways I used Everbridge Mass Notification for.

The best features Everbridge Mass Notification has is that it gives us details of critical events happening in a particular region we wanted to monitor, and that stands out as one of the most important ones because it helps us analyze the geographical location to inform the leadership team who is traveling.

The critical event alert has helped the team analyze how many employees are in the safer zone, whether someone is in trouble, if someone really needs help, how many employees are in that critical region, and what the criticality of the event is using Everbridge Mass Notification. This is one of the best features to add.

I have noticed many improvements while using Everbridge Mass Notification because it has helped us send alerts to a team or people in the organization at one time rather than selecting each person individually. We even received responses from the employees who had been notified, and that is one of the most positive things I have noticed using Everbridge Mass Notification rather than monitoring each person. If I had 500 people working in that location, we could analyze how many people responded to the alerts and whether they were in the safer zones. Based on that, we could filter who had not responded and then send the alert again to them.

Everbridge Mass Notification can handle growth pretty well and the usage can be increased based on the scalability of how it has been impacted during critical events.

Everbridge Mass Notification is one of the greatest tools, but sometimes it does not identify some of the locations. I think that would be something that has to be improved.

From my perspective, there are some negative things which I have noticed. During some events, we could not identify some of the locations or could not figure out the locations or map them out in Everbridge Mass Notification. That is the reason I have given an eight rather than nine or ten.

I have been using Everbridge Mass Notification for three years during my tenure at Novartis and at Sparklers.

I have not seen Everbridge Mass Notification downtime having an issue, so it was pretty reliable and I recommend any organization to use Everbridge Mass Notification.

Everbridge Mass Notification can handle growth pretty well and the usage can be increased based on the scalability of how it has been impacted during critical events.

I have not interacted much with the customer support team because any issue we had was dealt with by the director of the security services and the technology team.

As far as I worked, Everbridge Mass Notification was the only solution, and other than Everbridge Mass Notification, we used International SOS in the organization simultaneously. International SOS is a different tool which we subscribed to in addition to Everbridge Mass Notification because International SOS is only for employees who are traveling. Everbridge Mass Notification can be used for anyone who is working or who is in their home location.

I have never dealt with the initial setup, so it was my manager and the head of the organization who dealt with the pricing, setup cost, and everything. Everything was under the leadership team, not under the analyst or the lead working in the team.

Everbridge Mass Notification is pretty good as far as I have used it. There might be minute improvements, but I do not remember them as of now.

I think Everbridge Mass Notification has saved time and has been helpful for the employees who needed the information most.

I have never dealt with the setup cost, so it was my manager and the head of the organization who dealt with the pricing, setup cost, and everything. Everything was under the leadership team, not under the analyst or the lead working in the team.

I do not think they have anything other than the business relationship.

The critical event alert has helped the team analyze how many are in the safer zone or if someone is in trouble and if someone really needs help or how many employees are in that critical region and what the criticality of the event is using Everbridge Mass Notification. This is one of the best features to add.

Everbridge Mass Notification has saved time and has been helpful for the employees who needed the information most.

I have not seen Everbridge Mass Notification downtime having an issue, so it was pretty reliable and I recommend any organization to use Everbridge Mass Notification.

I would recommend using Everbridge Mass Notification to anyone who wanted to use it for mass notification because it is one of the best applications which is accurate in providing the information and data that we wanted to convey to the employees who are working. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

My main use case for Everbridge Mass Notification is threat intelligence and reporting. One specific example of how I use Everbridge Mass Notification for threat intelligence and reporting is when a linked notification from DataMiner shows up on Visual Command Center. I can use the Visual Command Center function to send messages and create a report from that incident that appears on Visual Command Center.

The best features Everbridge Mass Notification offers include convenient reporting. For example, if there is a traveler in an area and there is a risk notification, I can send them a communication very easily.

The convenient reporting feature helps me in my day-to-day work because it is easy for metrics at the end of the year, and it is helpful to get reports done quicker since all the information is pre-filled from VCC.

Everbridge Mass Notification has impacted my organization positively because it streamlines report writing and helps quicken our response times. I have not noticed any specific metrics regarding the impact on response times, but it helps because many of the fields are pre-entered, and being able to create templates that are easy to follow allows me to make our responses quicker.

Everbridge Mass Notification can be improved by allowing more flexibility in template writing in VCC. There are many times when I cannot edit a template from VCC when I go to launch a communication, which hampers me because I have to go into the open incidents and then launch it from outside of VCC.

I have been using Everbridge Mass Notification for three years.

Everbridge Mass Notification is stable.

The customer support was very responsive. I would rate the customer support an eight on a scale of one to ten.

I did not previously use a different solution before Everbridge Mass Notification.

I have noticed fewer employees needed because the system streamlines every step, indicating a return on investment.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Everbridge Mass Notification.

I would rate Everbridge Mass Notification a nine on a scale of one to ten. I give it a nine because it is very good compared to its competitor products, and it is a very reliable service.

Regarding Everbridge Mass Notification's AI capabilities, I think its accuracy and reliability of output are fairly accurate. However, pulling from social media always has the risk of inaccurate information, but other than that, it is fairly accurate.

My advice for others looking into using Everbridge Mass Notification is that I highly recommend it. My overall review rating for Everbridge Mass Notification is nine out of ten.

Evacuation alerts and notifications requiring acknowledgement and confirmation is my main use case for Everbridge Mass Notification.

I used Everbridge Mass Notification once to initiate a building-wide evacuation at a facility, at a client's facility in DC.

I also used it to notify building occupants of a building closure and ask them to confirm receipt, acknowledging that they would not report to the building.

I used Everbridge Mass Notification for quarterly testing, systems testing, as well as to initiate the annual earthquake great shakeout drill.

The best features Everbridge Mass Notification offers include the ability to notify a specific demographic on both work-related and personal devices. The ability to notify everyone on all of their devices at the same time or to throttle the notification so that it cycles through notification methods as people indicate for their individual profile what they prefer in terms of how they receive notifications on their various devices is also a key feature.

For something urgent requiring immediate action, using Everbridge Mass Notification was ideal to be able to notify everyone across all of their device methods at the same time so that regardless of whether they were in the office at work or at home on their day off, everyone was receiving the notification across all of their devices. For something less urgent or something that was truly just sharing for information purposes, being able to send a notification and have it be disseminated in accordance to the individual user's preference was helpful so that users were not being bombarded with messages across all their devices for something that was not actually urgent requiring immediate action.

Everbridge Mass Notification provided my client organization the ability for senior leadership and the executives in each facility to communicate as needed with everyone under their supervision. The agency administrator could communicate with everyone across the country at the same time. Individual senior leaders responsible for their individual buildings could also communicate with everyone under their supervision in their building at the same time. That provided a great deal of flexibility for executives to be able to communicate and communicate out and also receive information in from people in the field and people that may have been impacted by whatever the incident was.

With increased efforts to promote Everbridge Mass Notification and to market the benefit of using it and the benefit to individual users for signing up, there was definitely an increase in confirmation rates and acknowledgements when sending communications out over the course of a year for annual testing purposes. I would see increases in the number of people actually receiving and confirming that they received the message and took the appropriate response action based on the guidance provided in the message. Those percentages increased over time.

There were definitely metrics related to improved efficiencies in terms of communicating timely communications to staff across the enterprise with Everbridge Mass Notification. I do not have any insight into what those metrics are, but that client organization did not maintain tools that were not either providing some sort of cost savings or providing some sort of user benefit or increased efficiencies in terms of their operations.

I do not have any specific feedback on improvements at this point because it has been a while since I used Everbridge Mass Notification.

I do not know that any technology, including Everbridge Mass Notification, is going to be a perfect ten under the vast majority of circumstances. Therefore, I am reluctant to provide that kind of score.

In my last role, I used Everbridge Mass Notification for probably five or six years.

Everbridge Mass Notification was very stable when I used it.

I experienced no challenges with scalability.

Customer support for Everbridge Mass Notification was fine. I had a designated technical support specialist who was essentially responsible for my client's account, who could be called upon for technical support or if there were questions, and that person was very responsive.

I am not sure if my clients evaluated other options for Everbridge Mass Notification. I know they did a proposal soliciting bids for a mass notification solution, and they settled on Everbridge because Everbridge had either the best cost or the desired capabilities at the time. I do not know the other providers that they considered.

For my client's purposes at the time, Everbridge Mass Notification worked perfectly. It was seamless in terms of being able to add new employees as they onboarded, and pretty seamless in terms of aligning them to their respective facility and to their work division. There were really no issues with the technology itself on communicating and providing the appropriate alerts and notifications. If anything, the challenges were on the user's end with respect to the timeliness of removing people from the system when they left my client organizations. That was not within Everbridge Mass Notification's purview to correct. There were no real suggested improvements in my experience.

Make sure that you are considering the full capability of Everbridge Mass Notification for your organization's needs. I think my clients chose the low-end model, if you will, when there could have been some additional bells and whistles that they could have leveraged for crisis management as well. Have a demo and have the conversations with Everbridge Mass Notification sales and technical staff to make sure you are maximizing the solutions that they offer and coming away with something that is most suitable or most beneficial for your organization. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

I'm a manufacturing and distribution company's Senior Director of Operational Risk and Strategy. Anything related to technological or safety risks runs through my team.

We use Mass Notification to provide alerts about extreme weather events. We're located in the mid-Atlantic region, so hurricanes are common, but we also use it for ice storms, snow, tornadoes, etc. We use Everbridge to send notifications to our teammates and ask them about their status.

For example, we send follow-up questions to impacted teammates, asking them, "Hey, do you need anything? Do you need help? Can we reach out to you?" The tool enables two-way communication. In the past few years, we've also used Everbridge to complete daily check-ins for COVID-19. Some of our facilities are high-density, so we wanted to make sure that we ask questions about symptoms before our employees come to work. It was just a simple "yes" or "no" question that allowed us to understand the employee's health status. We were sending thousands of messages every day. 

The third use case would be any emergency, such as a security threat. We can use Everbridge to inform employees of an event that may impact them, such as a protest or a shooting. We might send out a message telling them to avoid the area. 

Everbridge allows us to protect our most important asset: our employees. We must protect the people who make deliveries for us, sell our products, work in our facilities, or come to an office. Without a tool like Everbridge, we have no way to communicate with a large number of people in seconds. Some employees don't have direct access to company-based email, but they usually have personal devices. Some of them have company devices, but many do not. The vast majority do not have company devices, so we use Everbridge Mass Notification to communicate with them directly.

My team's mission is to minimize risks to our facilities and people. We protect our people, care for them, and check on them to ensure they're okay during a crisis. Doing this also helps grow our bottom line because we can avoid paying large claims to impacted teammates. 

In general, employee safety creates massive value for our organization. If we prioritize employee safety from top to bottom, it affects productivity, morale, and turnover. We're retaining employees because people want to work for an organization that cares about them. 

It sends a message to a frontline teammate that the company cares enough to communicate with them even though we don't directly benefit financially from it. We're asking about their well-being and their families during an emergency. Everbridge allows us to fulfill that vision through a simple communication tool. It enables us to build a safety culture throughout our organization.

While Everbridge hasn't affected my productivity personally, it was helpful during COVID. We could communicate from a high level when teammates were quarantined or symptomatic to recalibrate and adjust at each location. Aside from that, I don't think it has affected productivity per se.

Everbridge helped us save time when we send out communications. Before we had Everbridge, we had to use call trees and spreadsheets to contact each employee one by one to check on them. When a storm came through, we had supervisors pull up the spreadsheet and call. Using Everbridge, we can quickly send a notification, and everybody gets it simultaneously. Everybody can respond or acknowledge that they received it within a couple of seconds.

We like the ability to integrate geolocation data from our HR system that tells us where teammates work or live. That information helps us calibrate the notification. If we know a storm or a tornado will hit a specific area, we can look at the map view within Everbridge. The feature is called the Universe View, and it's a section of the tool that lets us notify those folks based on the location data we have for them.

If you have a hurricane on the coast, you can chart its path on the map using the weather overlay tool. Then, you can select the impacted teammates on the screen. From there, you can create a notification that targets those specific teammates. It's critical to ensure your notifications are tailored to those affected by a particular event. You don't want to send it to everybody in the state or at one location. The notifications should be restricted to those who are impacted. 

The templates are also helpful. If you've got a scenario where you need to communicate quickly, you can create a new notification and type what you want to send out to the impacted individuals. It's better to think about that before an event takes place. That's where templates come in. You can save templates in a list and customize those as needed.

There are always variables. Some variables change in every situation. The tool asks a few quick questions, and you can quickly draft a notification based on what's already pre-built within the product. You don't need to scramble to type out a lengthy message and accidentally write something that might expose you to legal liability. We want to ensure each message has been thought out and approved by management instead of doing it in the heat of the moment.

We can ingest data from our HR system into Everbridge, like employees' names, departments, and contact information. For example, we can send notifications based on job titles and pay statuses. We might need to send messages to all non-salaried positions, supervisors, etc. 

If we collect that data on our side, we can send it to Everbridge, allowing us to tailor the notification based on essential demographic information or additional values in those data fields. For instance, I can send a message targeted to everyone in Nashville who is a manager and has a specific job title. 

Reporting is something Everbridge should improve. It's pretty basic. The tool has some reports, but you often need to go down to the Excel level and do it yourself. It would help if the solution had more robust in-app reporting tools and technology that offer an analysis of what you've sent out and some more details. 

I would also like to see more delivery methods. Everbridge sends messages via email, text, and phone, but what about Teams? We have people on Teams, which is another delivery method we could use to send information quickly. 

We have used Everbridge Mass Notification since 2017.

We haven't had problems with stability. Everbridge has been extremely reliable for us. We haven't had any downtime. During COVID, we had a minor delay in sending out messages, but that is rare. 

Some companies using this tool have more than 100,000 employees, but we're smaller. We have 17,000 employees who could receive notifications and haven't run into any scalability issues with the software.

I rate Everbridge support a nine out of ten. They have a 1-800 number we can call, and we have a client account manager. They also have online support and something called Everbridge University, their complete learning solution for the tool.

When I need to train new people on how to use the tool, I send them to Everbridge University. There are a lot of courses covering everything from sending notifications to creating messages. Their training offerings are pretty robust.

During implementation, they sent someone to our location for a few days to work with our team and ensure we were properly trained. They helped us implement the solution and get some templates going. 

Positive

Deploying Everbridge wasn't too complex. The hardest part of deploying a tool like this is integration. You need to pull in employee data and ensure that all the agreements are in place from a contract standpoint.

From a cyber-liability standpoint, we must ensure everything is locked down and secure. That took the longest time because we were sending so much personal data to a company. We have a contracting agreement with Everbridge, and we need to make sure that they're doing the work on their end to secure sensitive data. Once you get that done, the tool's very easy to use.

The implementation involves knowing which data fields we want to use, like job title, location, department, etc. When we're setting up the solution we need to know any data we plan to use down the road. 

We also had to configure role-based access. You can set up an individual for one location or a group of people. We probably have more than a hundred direct users who can access the tool locally. It isn't something where one person has total control over everything. We have assistant admins and local communicators or notifiers who can send out communications to teammates within their departments or sites.

Everbridge doesn't require maintenance as long as the HR system is connected and sends the data every night. That's the only maintenance you need to keep an eye on. But everything else is pretty straightforward.

It's hard to calculate the return on investment because we can't put a dollar amount on employee safety. However, the ability to communicate quickly and save lives could potentially help us avoid claims that cost millions of dollars. We can definitely get ahead of that by sending notifications and checking on our employees.

That's where the ROI comes in. Previously, we were solely reliant on supervisors at a location to manage a crisis, communicate with their teams, etc. This allows us to send alerts down and we know they will be delivered.

Everbridge is slightly more expensive vs. the competition. I'm aware of another company called AlertMedia that has a little more competitive pricing than Everbridge.

We looked at another solution called MIR3 (OnSolve). Everbridge came out as the winner because it was easier to use, and fit our business model and culture a little better than MIR3 did.

I rate Everbridge Mass Notification an eight out of ten. There are a few mass notification players out there, so you should find a tool that fits your culture, is easy to use, and makes sense for your organization. They all have the same functionalities, but some are better than others. 

Ease of use is where you will get the most value, but security is also crucial. You need a secure company that will protect your data. Check the terms of use and provisions on data privacy. Do your homework on each one.

I work for a university and we use Everbridge for mass notifications for either emergencies or regional events that require immediate notification. It doesn't have to be emergencies or dangerous situations, but notifications that need to go out to a very broad audience very quickly.

We've used it for power outages, weather events that might impact the students on campus, police activity, and earthquakes and natural disasters (although those events haven't been too serious). Everbridge gives a heads-up to our students who live on campus and our staff members who are working on campus to pay attention to and just be cautious about certain things.

The main advantage is that we are able to keep in constant communication with a very wide audience. At times, we have close to 10,000 students who are actually taking classes at our university. We also have a couple of thousand staff members. That's a wide audience and, at times, we need to communicate very urgently and quickly with them. Everbridge has allowed us to do that very efficiently.

Before we had Everbridge, if there was an emergency situation, we would have our campus safety people physically go to different locations and try to communicate. We also have a public address system over which we could try to just send out an audible message, but they're not as efficient. If we need to contact everybody very quickly, being able to contact people on their devices is helpful. Everbridge also allows us to push things to social media, digital signage, and to campus-run devices such as lab computers. We're able to push those notifications way more effectively through the use of Everbridge.

In terms of productivity, I'm sure our campus safety and communications teams see it as a necessary tool for those events. I don't know that they feel that they could do their jobs correctly without something like Everbridge. Everbridge has been that mass notification tool for us for almost 10 years now.

It has features that enable us to build dynamic audiences. We know, for example, that certain students live on campus while others are commuters. We sometimes target notifications to those who live in a certain area. That's a definite improvement over where we were before.

Having various audiences that we want to target in Everbridge helps save time. We also build notification templates so that if an emergency situation comes up, we are not writing things word for word, rather we're using those templates and filling in a minimal amount of data and pushing those messages out as quickly as possible. We've gained on the accuracy and efficiency of who we're targeting with these notifications.

Our organization has seen benefits from the reporting tools that come with Everbridge. As a company, Everbridge has different applications that you can pay for, and we don't have all of them. It's possible that some of those might provide even more reporting. But the reporting we have is very intuitive and provides good insight into the results when we send out a mass notification: Who is responding? How long is it taking? When do they receive the messages and through which medium? Are they replying through text messages? Are they replying through a website? That's a lot of information that helps us know how our audiences are responding.

We now have a lot of our staff members who can get into the Everbridge system and do various things, and the way Everbridge has set up permissions is somewhat tricky. Administrator-level permissions could be more intuitive. It could be easier to give people the specific permissions you want them to have. 

Also, there are a lot of integrations with third-party applications and services. Some of the documentation could be a little better on how exactly to integrate with those applications.

I've been using Everbridge for eight or nine years.

I work in IT and I help to manage the application at the IT level. I help with any integration of Everbridge with our email system, our domain, and our student information system that provides data so that we can target specific audiences. While my involvement is at the IT level, other departments generate the notifications, push them out, and interpret any data we get from them.

It seems very stable. At the times we've had to send out messages, we have never seen any technical issues with their systems.

From what I understand, only big institutions use their systems and their services, so it has to be really impressive how many messages they send out. Someone told us at one point how many millions of messages they facilitate sending out, and they can accurately track that they were delivered and they were responded to, each month, among their various customers. It's pretty impressive how scalable they are.

We have up to 10,000 students who are actively taking classes and a couple of thousand staff members. We're based in Azusa, California, but we do have some alternate locations within the City of Azusa, as well as some regional campuses around the greater Los Angeles area.

The geography is a little bit spread out, even here in Azusa on our main campus. We have staff members who are on campus during normal work hours and students who live here, so they're here 24/7. A student could be part of one semester and not part of the next.

It's a pretty diverse base and we want to communicate with them very quickly and efficiently, year-round.

We plan to increase our usage of Everbridge. In the last couple of years, we've done more integrations with the different applications and services they integrate with. We also want to have more well-defined target audiences in our account. We're going to use more and more features that it provides. Right now, the major hurdle is just our being organized and having the time to implement them. But we definitely want to use more of their features.

We've gotten pretty good technical support. We haven't engaged with them for anything super complex.

Over the last year, their liaison support has actually reached out to us to connect with us to see if we have everything we need. They have been very proactive in asking if we need anything from them or if they can help with something. Their support individuals have done a good job of keeping in contact with us.

Positive

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. From the moment you get into Everbridge, within 20 minutes, you can send a notification and make it conform to about 90 percent of what you want it to be. It's actually very intuitive on the Everbridge user side.

When we started, getting all of our student and staff data into Everbridge, from our student information and HR systems, took a little bit of work. Our systems are big and complex so it was hard getting our user data into Everbridge.

We had a couple of system administrators, a network engineer involved in the implementation, and a couple of software developers to pull data from our systems. We definitely needed our campus safety individuals, including our campus safety chief, and some of our communications department were involved as well.

Periodically, the system requires maintenance but not very much. It mostly runs on its own because it is hosted by them. They have contacted us a couple of times in the last few years when they changed some of their IP addresses for their systems. There's also a new encryption certificate they're going to provide us that we need to change on our side. So maintenance happens occasionally.

We got a little bit of support from Everbridge itself, but we didn't have any third-party help.

Our organization values the capabilities that Everbridge gives us. We've been a customer for almost a decade, so I know we're seeing value.

We have only used Mass Notification, but Everbridge does a lot. They have a really big suite of products and they count on institutions to do their homework and really know what it is they're getting into when they purchase a service. It's sometimes difficult to know what each product does. When we first purchased Everbridge, there were only one or two products, and now there are a handful of them and we don't really know what we get and what we don't get. Not knowing what capabilities they have and which products you need to receive other functionality, keeping track of all that, is somewhat hard. It was a lot easier when you bought one thing and you got everything.

Our main challenge was figuring out what we want to allow our audiences to be able to do. We went back and forth for a couple of years on this. Obviously, we want to notify people when there's something that we feel they need to be notified about. But if you give your audience the ability to remove themselves from all notifications, there's a chance that you won't actually be notifying the people that you want to notify. In the end, we prevented them from removing themselves or their contact methods, such as email and text. They cannot change their contact information in Everbridge. They have to receive notifications. If they're part of our organization, they're going to get them. That was just something we wrestled with, but it was more of a policy issue rather than an issue with Everbridge itself. We think we're doing what's best for our audiences.

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.  

I work for a higher education system with 17 institutions, so Everbridge is deployed across 19 locations. We have 12 colleges, five universities, and two system offices. Each has staff, faculty, and students receiving notifications.

We primarily use Everbridge for notifications about extreme weather and other emergencies. We also use the solution to send other higher education information about tuition payments, registration, etc. We also had grant-funded mental health support during the pandemic, so we used it to announce those services to students.

Right now, we aren't using any other Everbridge solutions, but we are trying to deploy the mobile app. There are a couple of other things we're looking into for events, but it hasn't been deployed yet.

We've discussed expanding use, but Everbridge discourages using the platform for anything besides emergency notifications. They want recipients to understand that it's an emergency when they see this type of alert. The company is steering us away from using it for other purposes, like notifying students when registration is open. However, this is the only mass messaging system with all contact information. I think we could define the messages so that people can differentiate between emergency and non-emergency alerts. This could be done by using different wording or including a subject line that notifies them that it's an emergency. 

We are a system of 17 colleges and universities, and we previously lacked a single platform for sending mass messages to all locations. Everbridge allows us to reach out across multiple channels, including home phone, cell phone, emails, work email, personal email, etc. You can populate a host of different data types and send a notification using various methods in one swoop.

The safety and security of our students are priorities. Everbridge helps us reach more people, and people are now expecting notifications. They know the messages should be coming, and I always get messages from people who didn't receive them. Everybody is pleased to be on the list and feels assured that they will be notified.

Everbridge can improve productivity, depending on how you use it. For instance, during COVID, we had students getting COVID relief checks, but they weren't cashing those checks because they didn't know whether they were valid. We used Everbridge to send mass notifications verifying that the checks were valid. 

We also followed up with students to notify them to cash their checks because they would expire. Everbridge enabled us to reach out to thousands of people who would've gotten these checks with the push of a button. It saved a lot of staff time and effort.

Everbridge is a time-saver in emergencies. We primarily use the platform for weather-related emergencies. Using the built-in features, I can post one message and have it go out to our mobile devices and post to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. 

We also had some security breaches or phishing situations where we could reach all our users to inform them what happened and how to react. It's difficult to reach thousands of students, staff, and faculty. Everbridge ensures we reach everyone.

We find the templates useful. We can pre-write them, save them, and reuse them over and over. For instance, we get snow and ice storms in the Northeast, so we have school delays and cancellations. Instead of drafting a new message for distribution each time, you create a template and deploy it. You can change the date of the event and specific information. It might say that class times will be delayed or we'll be closed for a day. 

My situation might not be common, but there are 17 organizations within our system, and upper management wants to know about all notifications at every level. Right now, I have to manually enter the notifications, and there is no copy function across organizations. 

It would be immensely helpful if I could take a contact record, save it to the clipboard, and duplicate it across other organizations within my system. I've had to create a template and upload that to 17 organizations. I have to duplicate that in a spreadsheet, with multiple rows for each organization, and upload that file. That's how I'm populating it rather than manually typing in every record in every organization for the president and all their contact information. 

There are a few quirks in the interface that drive me nuts. It seems trivial, but when you have thousands of records, you want to see more than 25 results per page. I have to change the settings for results per page each time I switch between one of our 17 institutions. It's a bit irritating to do that 17 times in an hour. I should be able to change that default setting and permanently store it. They also changed the search query to search by phone instead of name. Who looks for somebody using a phone number? It's just kind of little silly things that I don't think they use in a large-scale environment like I am. 

I have been an Everbridge admin for two years.

Everbridge is highly stable. 

Everbridge's scalability is good. 

I rate Everbridge support a nine out of ten. I haven't used technical support much, but our account manager is phenomenal. I can reach her at any time to get help, and she's invaluable to me. She is based on the West Coast. Our account manager is a nice person, and we have a good working relationship.

The technical support is highly responsive. When you call outside of regular hours, you might get someone from another country and sometimes you need to explain your issue a little more. That's one area where all companies are falling short. They outsource to other countries to save money, and communication barriers can make it hard to get answers quickly. That can be frustrating.

Positive

Before Everbridge, the security department primarily managed notifications. Each institution had its own separate system, so there was no consistency. Many of our students attend multiple institutions within the system. They would get a notification from an institution via one method and get another notification from the other institution. Now, they get one message from the same platform and know what to expect.

I'm an applications administrator, so I've sent messages using many methods, but they're not necessarily mass notification systems. I used the mass notification option or feature in various scenarios. For instance, I use the Blackboard Learning Management system, which has a mass notification that I've used. 

Everbridge is a cloud-based solution, and everything was set up before I joined the organization. It requires very little maintenance. We update our contact data each night, and it also uses certificates that must be updated. However, the vendor performs all the backend software upgrades.

I handle any records that need to be entered manually and custom notifications. For example, I can make a specialized notification for people who haven't paid off their accounts. I upload those contacts, send out the message, and delete them, so don't duplicate the users in the system and increase the license cost.

Students and faculty are so overwhelmed with coursework that they tend to ignore emails. Messages from this system catch their attention. And again, for the various reasons that we use it for, registration, "Your registration hasn't gone through. Your payment hasn't been processed," whatever kind of message, it definitely gets their attention. The return on investment from that standpoint alone is invaluable. But then let's just unfortunately say that we have a mass shooting or something like that. How can you measure? How can you actually measure that return on investment based on that? You're talking about lives. So, what's the value of one life? It would be paid off in just being able to reach that one person and get them to safety.

I'm not involved with purchasing, but I know that the license is based on the number of contacts in the system. The fact that I have to duplicate my executive management across multiple organizations adds to my user count. It hasn't been enough that we need to worry about it, but I have a reminder on my weekly calendar to eliminate unused accounts. When I manually onboard a user, I need to remember when that person leaves the organization because I have to remove them. 

We have a checklist for when someone leaves, but it's also multiplying my user count by 17. The president of our organization wants to see every message that goes out, so he's in the system 17 times for each of the organizations. If he leaves, I need to delete 17 contacts and add 17 more. 

I rate Everbridge Mass Notification a nine and a half out of ten.