Subject:
Title
New Town of Vienna Alerting System - Everbridge
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BACKGROUND SUMMARY:
Fairfax County, along with many of the jurisdictions in the Metropolitan region have entered into an agreement with Everbridge, Inc. to provide a more comprehensive alerting and notification system for their citizens. During the fall of 2014, Fairfax County reached out to the Town of Vienna, Fairfax City, and the Town of Herndon to inform us that we all are able to utilize their Everbridge system to provide notifications and alerts to our citizens at no cost.
OVERVIEW:
The new Everbridge Mass Alerting system will allow the Town to send notifications to individuals or groups using subscribed lists, locations, and visual intelligence. Staff will be able to expand how it notifies citizens through more personalized message delivery. Everbridge Mass Notification supports different delivery methods such as voice recording, text to speech conversion in multiple languages, push notifications, rich text formatting, and text. Everbridge notifications can also be shared with public websites, internal systems, and social media as well.
SUMMARY/STAFF IMPRESSIONS:
Town staff have been working closely with Fairfax County and other jurisdictions in the area over the past few months. The Town staff has been able to learn best practices from the various localities and is ready to create its market campaign and begin the migration process from the existing CivicPlus alert system hosted on the Town's website. Staff is pleased with the many improvements that will be gained from using Everbridge for alerting. In particular Everbridge will replace our older Reverse 911 system and save the town $6,000.00 in maintenance costs, as well as provide real time weather alerts based on an address rather than an overall general location.
RECOMMENDATION:
No Action by Council is requested.