Everbridge

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 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.

Everbridge is primarily for emergency communication. It could be used for smaller alerts, but we mostly use it for life-threatening events, like extreme weather or an active shooter. Only a couple of employees (security and campus communications) use and maintain the solution.

I took over Everbridge and re-engineered it for our university. I updated all the templates and trained various users. In the past, our campus use was simple and limited. I re-architected it to work with multiple systems. Everbridge was already in place when I joined, but I overhauled how we utilized the tool and connected it to more systems. We have optimized the platform over two years using all the communication templates and features natively in the software.

The administration is cloud-based, so we log in and manage that. Nothing is on-prem except our contact list, which we upload via the API. Everbridge is deployed in two locations: our communications office and our public safety/emergency office. Those are the administrators. We have about 30,000 end-users who receive notifications, including faculty, staff, students, and online students.

Everbridge enabled us to minimize the number of people and amount of labor involved in sending out notifications during a crisis. Then maintenance has been minimal, so we don't have to maintain it as much when it's not in use. These systems have been consistent once we connected them and set them up. There are several ways to access the tool and send mass notifications during a crisis. Everbridge is reliable and effortless to use.

We can immediately get messages out through various channels from one platform during a crisis. Everbridge allows us to send messages in minutes. In an emergency, that can save lives. We reduced the number of people managing those individual channels from 10 to 1.

Instead of crafting multiple messages for various applications and logging into different platforms like TV, website, email, etc., we can send alerts from one place. We have saved a lot of time by creating templates with messages that have been pre-authorized.

We only need to change a few fields, which saves us some headaches. It publishes messages to different channels automatically. That saves a huge amount of time compared to sending notifications from each tool one at a time. It also reduces the risk of error. For example, someone might fail to copy and paste the information correctly or mistype something in one channel. There's a lot less risk because it's in one area now.

Everbridge is a dynamic tool that integrates well with our other systems. We can trigger messages from one platform to multiple places. The messages are sent to campus TVs and our website. We've been able to connect it through a lot of different options.

Everbridge has a huge amount of documentation, which is great. I think they've done a wonderful job on that. However, it can be difficult to sort through all of that to find what you need but I am glad they have it and it is up to date.

They have a vast knowledge base for help articles, and it can be a little overwhelming sometimes. Trying to dive into specific use cases can take time but their support staff is really quick to answer any questions.

I have managed and updated our Everbridge instance for almost six years. The tool has been in place at the university for more than 10 years.

Everbridge has been perfectly stable so far. I've never had login issues or downtime.

Everbridge is highly scalable. You can use it for multiple departments. For example, you can use the tool to notify people about IT outages. It has multiple potential use cases. We decided not to use it for those use cases, but there is a lot of potential if our university decides to go that route. And we could utilize a lot more additional functionality.

I rate Everbridge support a ten out of ten. They've always been responsive to tickets or feature requests. I have monthly meetings with my account representative. When we submit information to them, they've been phenomenal about getting back to us with answers and suggestions.

They do a wonderful job providing customer service and training. Their engineers are always available to help you with troubleshooting or figuring out new ways to utilize their tools.

We see an ROI from the ease of use and reliability. Other systems can't manage a crisis as well as Everbridge. Unlike other SMS platforms or other tools, Everbridge is designed for emergencies, so the reliability is there. We haven't compared it with other tools because we've been with them for so long. This is the tool we trust for our emergencies and we utilize it instead of other ones we use for general communication.

I can't speak about other emergency platforms. I'm talking about commercial text applications that send students academic notices and grades versus Everbridge, which is what we use for a life-threatening emergency.

The pricing seems fair.

I rate Everbridge Mass Notification a ten out of ten. Everbridge developed great knowledge and insight over the years, and its representatives bring that to the table during emergencies. They provide useful suggestions, training, guides, emergency planning programs, and other options to help you benefit from the tool and the professional knowledge that they bring. They've been involved in many emergencies over the years.

I find that beneficial, especially if you have several new employees or people that haven't had to face some of these mass emergencies before. They prepare you with tons of information. I recommend looking beyond the technical aspects of the tool. As a whole organization, Everbridge provides many benefits, including workshops, training, speakers, guidance, various scenarios, and great customer service.