Everbridge Mass Notification Reviews

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. 

This solution is primarily used as one of our emergency notification methods, and we use many of the solution's features. If there's a significant emergency on campus, we can alert our community, faculty, staff, and students via text, voice calls, and email. We also have Everbridge tied into our social media so we can push alerts there, and we use the RSS feature to push notifications to our primary website. In one scenario, we had a significant emergency response from police and fire on the campus, and we used the solution to send out messages multiple times throughout the day. Initially, asking people to avoid the area, but also countering rumors and providing updates. In another instance, we had to close a building earlier than planned due to an unexpected incident. Most recently, we've been using what we call timely notifications via email only; it's a requirement under federal law for universities to inform individuals when crimes occur on or around campus. Unless we need people to take immediate action, such as seeking a safe location, we can send alert emails using a template. We have specific users with limited access and can only send out alerts via email using the created template, which is a good feature.   

We have two main campuses in Chicago that are relatively close to one another, with our staff spread across both campuses. We typically use the web version of the solution, but a few of us have the ManageBridge app that allows us to use it from our phones, although that isn't our preferred method. Approximately 20 staff split across two departments with different roles have varying levels of access to the platform. I'm in Public Safety which is in charge of security on campus, and we have several users who can send alerts. However, we typically rely on our Marketing and Communications department, responsible for launching emergency notifications. We work closely with them, and both departments ensure the facts are correct and the language is tweaked before notifications go out. Fortunately, we've had a little time in most emergencies to get the language right before sending the message. 

Everbridge contributes to our mission; it's conducive to keeping everybody safe and informed about emergencies on campus. It's a great tool, and while we can get information out inside our buildings using speaker systems, fire alarms, etc., for those outside of buildings or on their way to campus, we need to make sure they know to stay away or that they are informed, depending on the situation. The university has a substantial commuter population, so our communication must extend beyond just the buildings. The solution has been essential to keeping that communication running during emergencies.  

Everbridge Mass Notification increased our productivity; it's much more efficient than sending out emails as we used to. Additionally, the product we used previously took more time and wasn't as reliable as Everbridge. We can use the solution from any browser and even launch it from our phones if we have to. This flexibility saves time.

We like the simulation mode, a relatively new feature for Everbridge. It allows our users to practice sending out alerts, which is especially useful for new users transitioning to the platform, and was only possible after this feature was added. If we can't practice regularly, we'll be more nervous in an emergency which increases the chance of mistakes, and we need to be ready to send out those alerts.

The solution positively affected our mass notification capabilities; we customized our notifications using templates to look a little nicer when sending emails. We can also customize user permissions using the roles feature, which is very nice. 

When using the simulation mode, the capacity to send an email or text message to a small test group would be good, so those practicing with the solution can see what notifications look like on the user end.

We've been using the solution for less than a year.

The solution is stable; we haven't had any issues so far. It's always been up when we've logged in, the texts go out rapidly, voice calls take a little longer, but that's the nature of the beast, and emails go through pretty quickly too. In addition to our actual uses, we carried out testing where we sent notifications to everyone, which worked very well.

The scalability is excellent; Everbridge works for a small number of users and many users.

The customer support is excellent, and we're delighted by how quickly they respond. We recently had a minor issue, and they got back to us within an hour or two. They didn't have an answer at first but contacted me to say they were looking into it, which was really good to hear.

Positive

We previously used a solution called Rave Alert. It worked and was fine functionally speaking; we could send text, emails, and so on, but it wasn't as flexible as Everbridge. Everbridge allows us to customize user roles for who can send what. It also came at a much more competitive price point when we reviewed all the vendors, so we switched due to the usability, flexibility, and price. 

We also had our internal email tool separate from Rave and moved away from it because it had issues with different browsers.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, and the Everbridge representative we worked with assisted us greatly. They helped us with the setup, migration, and ensuring we got our data into the platform so we could contact our users. As with all technical projects, we ran into a few issues, but we managed to troubleshoot them and get them sorted out.

Three to four IT staff members and I were involved in the deployment, though we weren't all working full-time on it. One team member did a lot of the work and prepared our data; the others were available to help troubleshoot issues where required and oversee the process.

We set up a daily feed to EverBridge checking the information, including current students, faculty and staff, their mobile numbers, email addresses, etc., is correct. This process is automated and takes place every day at noon, and I get confirmation that it worked, so it is not maintenance per se. If there were an issue with the data, then that is something we would have to look into.

We implemented the solution using our in-house IT team, who are excellent.

It's challenging to quantify an ROI, especially in an area like emergency notification, but we're happy with the product, and the price is good for us.

The product's pricing is the most competitive of the three solutions we evaluated. One feature we have yet to use is the keyword opt-in functionality, which Everbridge included in the price. In contrast, Rave Alert wanted to charge us extra.

The opt-in feature is helpful for large-scale events such as graduations, where users who aren't typically included can opt into our notification system, as they'll be on campus for a day or more.

We had been using Rave for many years, and it was functioning, but we came to a point where we were long overdue for a good market analysis of the other products out there. We evaluated our current solution at the time, Rave Alert, Everbridge Mass Notification, and OnSolve CodeRED.

We didn't like the OnSolve platform's usability during our demo, so we quickly took them out of the running. We enjoyed the flexibility Everbridge offers and were surprised to find out they came in slightly cheaper than Rave, despite us being customers of the latter for many years.

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Before using Everbridge, our challenge was that our previous solution wasn't as flexible, and we experienced some issues with the platform. We also had problems with an internal email tool we were using, which was unreliable and had issues depending on the browser used. 

My advice to others evaluating the solution is to consider who will send messages and what type. There's an incident platform and a notification platform in Everbridge; they're the same tool, but the incident platform allows greater flexibility when providing different user access levels. Post-deployment, we had to look into how incidents work because we wanted one group of users to be able to send emails only, for example. The incident platform works well in enabling us to do that.

We plan to leverage the keyword opt-in feature for our next graduation and potentially similar events.  

We're a law firm with 200 employees; 90% of the firm is based in New York, and we have seven other offices, five of which are out of the country. 

We initially started using the solution for business continuity purposes, but since the pandemic, we switched to using it for IS outages. When we had hurricane Sandy, we used the platform to send blast notifications to everybody in the organization, informing them the firm would be closed. Now we use it more for IS purposes; we use Microsoft Outlook, and if there is an outage, we can fall back on Everbridge to send a message that our systems are down and report back as soon as they are up again.   

We can now contact our staff outside our network, which is essential when we have system or network outages. Everbridge is the only way we can send a message to everyone, primarily via text to their cell phones. 

The solution helps contribute to our organization's business goals and mission because we operate 24/7 and always look out for our employees. 

The platform has increased our productivity since we started using it for IS outages; if we experience an issue with Outlook, we can still contact all our staff by phone. That alone saved a couple of hundred phone calls to our help desk from employees reporting problems on Outlook. 

The ability to text all our staff and categorize by specific fields, such as department or position, are valuable features. We can gear messages to specific people or target a particular office, such as the New York office or Washington DC office only. We can target specific departments, such as corporate or litigation, which is very useful for us. Once, we had an active shooter near our Washington, DC, office, and we could send out a message to all the staff in that office. On another occasion, there was a Long Island railroad strike so we could contact all our staff who lived there. 

Everbridge can send out conference bridge meetings, but as nobody uses conference calls anymore, we would love to be able to generate Zoom links through the solution. That would be extremely helpful.

We've been using Everbridge Mass Notification for around six years. 

The solution is very stable. 

Regarding scalability, it's precisely what we need, and I rate the solution 10 out of 10 here.

We reached out to our account rep a few times, but we never had a problem we had to escalate to customer support. The support we have received, however, is excellent. 

Positive

The pain point we experienced before using Everbridge was that our previous mass notification system was slower and more challenging. In a high-stress situation, we need to be able to get messages out to our staff quickly and efficiently. 

Before Everbridge, we used a system called Send Word Now, but it's a more clunky application; there are around four different navigation pages to send one message. Everbridge makes the process straightforward because we can configure a message on one page and send it quickly. This gives us confidence because we know that we can act relatively quickly in an emergency, even if we are very stressed. 

Before we used Send Word Now, we relied on email. We used Send Word Now for several years, and our position required us to assess the market periodically. The Everbridge name came up in a business community tabletop exercise, and other businesses and government agencies were starting to use it. This piqued our interest, and we contacted a salesperson to investigate further.

I can't speak to the complexity of the deployment as I'm not in the IT department, and I was minimally involved.

Regarding maintenance, I maintain the daily feed which comes into Everbridge. Sometimes we get error messages because the feed has incorrect information, which is helpful as they allow me to fix the mistakes. For example, suppose an employee puts their phone number into the internal firm directory but forgets to include the area code. In that case, I'll get an Everbridge error message informing me.

We see an ROI, though the solution doesn't generate capital or involve production. It's available 24/7, and we can use it whenever necessary. Our foreign offices, including our Hong Kong office, also use the product, which is helpful.

We recently renewed our contract, and the pricing is on the higher end. We have a yearly license with a three-year commitment, which seems standard, so we have no issues with that.

We evaluated all the big names in the marketplace. 

I rate the solution 10 out of 10. 

We use Everbridge for emergency notifications within our organization and send out calls for staffing. The mass notification suite is the only Everbridge solution we're using now. I had a call with Everbridge about six months ago to look at some of their ancillary solutions. We haven't delved into it too much, but I generally prefer consolidating on a platform and going with one vendor if I can.

My company operates two hospital systems in Oklahoma. We have a physician-owned hospital, two primary acute care facilities, and 70 ambulatory centers around the state. 

About 30 people have direct access to Everbridge, but our user base is around 3,000. Several departments regularly use the platform. The registration staff is responsible for any critical event notifications. The nursing department uses it for staffing notifications, and the IT team sends critical communications regarding outages and upcoming maintenance activities.

Everbridge has several benefits. We can put out calls for staffing needs daily. These messages can be targeted to campuses, job roles, and specific floors that are short-staffed. This feature has been highly effective. We also have mass notifications that we send out for other reasons, like system outages, safety threats, etc. I can generate those notifications in seconds. Spinning up alerts, sending them, and tracking their utilization is effortless.

Everbridge helped us get in front of issues. We have several folks that I would refer to as system-wide directors who spend a lot of time traveling between campuses. We needed a mechanism to get notifications to them regardless of where they were. Everbridge's architecture allows me to accommodate that workflow and others unique to my organization.

We didn't have a solution before, so Everbridge was a considerable improvement in that sense. Email was the only mechanism we had for mass notifications, and it was highly ineffective.

Everbridge is essential. In addition to inclement weather events, we've got incidents like mass shootings. We had an incident recently at our partner campus next door, and we used Everbridge to send out alerts to our staff for that potential mass shooting event. 

The solution also increased productivity. We've had high-status areas that otherwise would have gone unstaffed had we not been able to use Everbridge to put those calls out. Also, we get surprise audits from our various credentialing agencies. Everbridge allows us to put teams on alert when those surprise audits happen so we can prepare those areas for visitors.

I haven't calculated how much time I've saved using the solution, but it eases the burden of figuring out which teams I need to connect with and what messages I need to send. I can get into the system and fire off a notification in 30 seconds. It's highly efficient. 

Everbridge can break up our organization into groups for sending targeted notifications. That's probably the feature I find most helpful. Tornadoes are a huge issue here in Oklahoma, and our campuses are about 30 miles apart. Using this feature, I can send tornado warnings to the campus that's in immediate danger.

You can manage the structure of the groups in two different ways, and I'd like to see some consolidation. They have something called "groups" and another called "rules." You can achieve your objective with either, but it's somewhat redundant. 

I would also like to have more visibility into logins. They could reduce the steps I need to take to troubleshoot failed notifications, carrier issues, or folks who have stopped SMS messaging. I can get there, but it takes a fair amount of drilling down and investigating to answer the question. It would be helpful to have more visibility on the back end.

I have been using Everbridge for about three and a half years now.

Everbridge is probably one of the most stable platforms I have.

Everbridge will accommodate my needs for the next 25 years. We might see an uptick in use a little on the IT side. I'm looking at the other solutions Everbridge provides and how they might fit into our strategic plan. I'm doing that across several different domains and vendors. We've got a lot of one-off solutions, but as vendors release new offerings, consolidate, and merge, we're looking for ways to consolidate.

I rate Everbridge's support a ten out of ten. I've logged a few tickets over the years. Their team is responsive and thorough. Most of our issues have been due to a lack of understanding on our part. I've never faced a technical issue, outage, or bug on the platform, which is rare. 

Positive

The initial setup was incredibly smooth. The engineering team that came to our site was helpful. Most of our challenges were self-imposed. We didn't know the platform, the jargon, or how things functioned. After the training, we built everything, stood it up, and turned it on.

I was responsible for everything on our end. I established the feed from our HRIS system to onboard users, set up the groups' custom data parameters, and configured the rules built into the system. After deployment, it doesn't require upkeep, which has been delightful.

We deployed it with help from the vendor team. They were knowledgeable and super professional. Everbridge's engineers consulted with us. They understood the unique challenges we had as an organization and devised solutions for them.

We changed plans halfway through our engagement with Everbridge. I liked the original license agreement a little better, but I understand the model they went to. They shifted to a consumption-based model, which isn't ideal. It has limited my use of the platform to some degree, but I get it. I understand where they're coming from.

I rate Everbridge Mass Notification a ten out of ten. If you plan to implement Everbridge, I suggest getting creative. The platform's native features enable you to target your messaging creatively. 

I've got information that is not necessarily in our databases but needs to be included in Everbridge notifications. For example, I added a custom field to Everbridge that I use to tag specific members of a leadership team and use that tag to target those groups. Everbridge is constructed to enable you to accomplish anything you want in terms of message targeting.

We use the solution when we want to get a message out to all of our staff or throughout the state. We use it to notify them of service unavailability and other issues, including emergencies such as power outages. When we have inclement weather, we use the solution to inform staff if they don't have to come into the office or if they need to take any precautions.  

We also use Urgent Desktop alerting by Everbridge; it's similar to Mass Notification and allows us to send alerts to company desktops.   

The most significant benefit of using the solution is leveraging multiple ways to contact our staff; we can get to them by email, text, and phone to ensure the message gets through. Then there's the feedback loop to inform us that they successfully received the message. We noticed the benefits of using the product immediately.   

Regarding Everbridge contributing to our business goals and mission, it enhances our communication, helps us keep our staff informed, and serves as a tool for our continuity of operations plans.  

The product dramatically increased our organization's mass notification capabilities, especially in our ability to verifiably contact.  

The platform has improved our productivity by making it easier to communicate through multiple methods and streamlining and providing accurate notifications around events.   

The most valuable features are the ease of use and the ability to set up templates for similar events, which helps streamline and makes it faster to get the message out, especially during a crisis.

Regarding improvement, it could be clearer around selecting groups of users to notify; it could be more intuitive to pick who we want to send messages to.

In terms of pain points, it was more difficult to reach out to staff in the way that is most effective for them.

We have been using the solution for five years. 

The platform is stable. 

The solution is scalable. We don't have plans to increase our usage, as we are already using it to the fullest extent. 

Everbridge Mass Notification is the first solution of this type we've used; we previously relied on email etc.

The initial deployment was straightforward and took about a month. A team of five was responsible for the implementation, and it doesn't require any maintenance on our end. 

We have the solution deployed state-wide and have approximately 500 total users.  

The ROI is not quantifiable, but the solution provides the service we pay for and does it effectively. 

The product is fairly priced. 

I rate the solution nine out of ten; there's always room for improvement.

The main pain point we experienced before using the solution was the difficulty in reaching out to staff in the way that was most effective for them. It was more challenging to get messages out and made us less effective overall. 

Using multiple products from the same vendor helps with potential integration and ease of use.  

Having multiple Everbridge products affects the learning curve when implementing subsequent solutions, but we don't have any data on time saved because the integration is very new. The products are well integrated.

Using Mass Notification and Urgent Desktop creates efficiencies. 

I recommend Mass Notification; it's a great product, the implementation is easy, and it's effective.  

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. 

Positive

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.