Challenge
Fairfax County needed to improve emergency communications for a diverse community with varying language and notification preferences.
Solution
Fairfax County replaced its previous mass notification vendor due to platform limitations, choosing Everbridge for its superior geofencing, multi-channel notifications, and more inclusive communication capabilities. Everbridge now enables timely, targeted alerts while minimizing unnecessary communications.
Transcript
[00:05.5]
We’ve been with Everbridge since 2014 and prior to Everbridge we were with another vendor, that had limitations. What Everbridge brought to us is the ability to really, singularly define where we want the message to go and send it to people how they want to receive it.
[00:21.8]
Whether a text or an email or call. It gave us that flexibility. It also made it faster. So when we are, let’s say something happened in a county in Northside, and our duty officer or somebody was on a call, they could just jump onto the computer, send out the message.
[00:38.5]
It would get there within 25, 30 seconds. That was impressive to us. That was one of the reasons why we decided to move over to Everbridge
[00:48.8]
We have eight specific languages, that we cater to, but we have over 180 different dialects. The recommendations that we have received from our residents is English is not my first language. We like to be able to sign up for the system and receive messages, at least a lot of the messages in our own language.
[01:07.4]
So we’ve been really working with Everbridge and Everbridge is now bringing this AI solution to us that’ll give us the ability to have people sign up in their own language and also receive messages in their own language. Third thing that we really like is the flexibility with the Everbridge system with incident communications and allowing residents to really determine what it is that they want and when they want it and how they want it.
[01:31.5]
That’s how you keep people engaged, that’s how you prevent your organization from losing, subscriptions, is to make it flexible for them. And Everbridge, through the technology has really helped us with that.
[01:46.5]
cutting edge technology. Ever since we’ve been with Everbridge in this, in the national capital region, it’s always, you guys are ahead of the ball. You always bring things into us and saying, hey, we noticed that you guys are sending out a lot of messages.
[02:01.7]
This particular. Well, we have a new process or new tool that will help you. A good example of that is the safety connection. Everbridge, came to us and said, hey, this is part of your program. Here’s what we can do for you. We’re in a safety, connection.
[02:17.6]
I know you have family, services people that go to folks house, law enforcement, health and human services people. We have a security measure that you may like. You can determine whether it goes to 911, you can determine whether it goes to somebody’s phone. You can make that determination and We’ve had multiple jurisdictions that have purchased the safety connection, equipment, the tools, and are currently using it.
[02:40.2]
So we like that. I do, on occasion, have the ability to talk to other jurisdictions, some of my, colleagues, Chicago, New York, Louisiana about how they do business. Everbridge has gotten us in contact, and we’re able to communicate with each other as project managers to make sure that we’re doing it the best possible way we can.
