Challenge
Denver County needed a better way to notify civilian employees working in the field during public safety incidents.
Solution
Everbridge’s geofencing and mobile notifications deliver timely alerts to employees in affected areas while minimizing unnecessary communications.
Transcript
[00:05.7]
One thing that I’ve enjoyed with Everbridge is the customer support, customer service and the responsiveness of the team that we have for us. Our account manager, getting people on the phone calls with us and doing all the things, to help us get through a crisis. Just recently, within the last year and a half, we’ve gone over to incident notifications, or incident alerts.
[00:30.2]
And incident messaging has been a lifesaver for us. It really has changed us from taking about five to 10 minutes to do launch to being able to get launches out in less than three minutes, with training and being able to write templates. So that’s been a real win for our team, being able to fill in the blanks, put in the information and send it out.
[00:49.8]
Building the templates is simple, and you can make doing a notification very, very smooth for the end user. So that all I have to really do is draw a map, fill in the details and send it and be done.
[01:04.9]
And that’s been really nice to us.
[01:10.6]
Additionally we started a new project a year and a half ago where we wanted to notify civilian field units. Law enforcement officers obviously are aware of things that are happening on the street, but we didn’t have a mechanism in the city and county of Denver to notify civilian units who didn’t have a radio, who weren’t armed of a situation or a thing happening in their area.
[01:33.0]
And when they would come to us and say, is there a way we can get alerts? The answer was always no, because there wasn’t a fixed address to send that alert to them for. We could send it to your bosses and then they can text it out to you. But we didn’t have that mechanism. Working with the Everbridge team, we finally were able to resolve that gap in our communication.
[01:56.2]
And we have what we now call field units, where we’ve leveraged the incident fencing and been able to add that incident fencing by providing them access to the Everbridge app, registering them and getting them involved in a private incident fence, and pulling their data from Workday into our API and being able to gather that information.
[02:20.6]
So now when we have a man with a gun in Civic Center park, let’s say we can draw a map around Civic Center park and we can notify them as they’re working in that, that park and it gives them the opportunity to take life safety measures. What we think is really cool about the tool is not only that we’re notifying the people in the park in the moment, but we’re not notifying people across the city, and we’re not having that alert fatigue, but we are also notifying the person who wasn’t in that mapped area that drives into it.
[02:53.7]
They’ll also get a notification within two or three minutes, and that’s been really cool. So we’ve gotten feedback from our field units. We’re continuing to implement more teams onto that, and that’s been a win for us.
