Everbridge Mass Notification Reviews

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, their 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 the last two and a half 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 20 to around 5. 

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 three and a half 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. 

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 Mass Notification for sending out robocalls to our residents. In the broadest sense, if we have a message to go out to all residents, we just send a blanket message. We have about 27,000 individuals in the system. They are either who have signed up to use it or are pulled from white pages and yellow pages. 

We have mass notifications, such as COVID notifications, that go out to everyone. When we were setting up testing or inoculation centers, we would send messages to let everybody know what was available. In addition, we do targeted messages so that if there are street closures for repairs or an event, we can target a particular section of town and send a message out to residents in just that area.

It provides the ability to push out messages. We have a website, and we have social media, but they, of course, are targeted. If somebody is not looking at the website, they're not going to see it. You have to actively seek out the website to find that. Social media people have to be on social media, and they have to be on at the time you're sending messages out. For a robocall, you choose your time and send it out, and you get a ready-made audience.

It hasn't helped us save time, but it gave us another avenue to get the communications out. It has improved our ability to communicate.

Most recently, the ability to pull from white pages and yellow pages is valuable. It used to be that we were using the system and people had to sign up to be included in it, and just last year, we were given the option to pull from white pages and yellow pages, which broadens our audience considerably.

There are certain aspects of the system that don't work exactly as I would like them to. I've been working with them literally for years to get certain things resolved, and there are always issues and problems. One of the issues that we've been dealing with recently and for some time now is that some people don't get the message. It goes out to 27,000 people, and afterward, I hear from people that they did not get the message, or their phone didn't ring, and it didn't go to voicemail. Nothing happened, and they were just dropped. This seems to be an ongoing issue.

In conjunction with that, there is an ability for me to download a spreadsheet that lists what happened with the outgoing call. It lists everybody included in the call and what they should have received. In other words, if they hung up, if it went to the voicemail, or if they picked up and answered, all that is in the database/spreadsheet. That doesn't seem to correspond to reality in all cases. Sometimes, it says that people got the call, but they didn't.

Another issue is that when the call comes in, it sometimes gets truncated, so the beginning of the message is missing from the call. These are all glitches that we've been working on with them, and they're still ongoing. If you let it go to voicemail, it records your message, but sometimes, it truncates the beginning. What happens is that in the end, it says, "To repeat this message, press two", and then it says that three times. If you do not press two, it repeats the message anyway, so that winds up with a long voicemail message on people's machines or voicemails.

I've been with the town for about six years, and very soon after I started with the town, I took it on. It was with the town prior to my coming there, so I don't know how long they've been using it.

Its stability is fine. There are no problems.

We send out messages, and certain people don't receive them. They get it one day and then the next day, we send the same message, and they don't get it. According to Everbridge, there is a possibility that this is because of the number of people involved, and they are looking into this. 

I've contacted their tech support. They're relatively easy to get hold of. I've reached out to them at night, and I've reached out to them from outside the country. I never had a problem getting through to somebody. Their frontline people are very helpful in using the system. For example, if the mapping changed and I had a question about that, I could call and get help over the phone, and they seem to be knowledgeable about that and very helpful. The downside is connecting with the actual tech people. When there's a problem where the frontline people need to get tech people involved, there's an extra step, and that's more complicated. I'd rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

When I came on board, it was already in use. I wasn't here before that, so I don't know the pain points or challenges we experienced prior to using Everbridge Mass Notification.

We haven't used any other solutions by Everbridge. We are only using Everbridge Mass Notification. For the most part, it's just robocalls, but we occasionally also send out text messages using Everbridge Mass Notification.

I was not involved in its deployment. The maintenance involved would be when they implement changes. In some cases, we had to almost relearn the system. There was a change about a year ago that impacted the mapping, and it worked entirely different than previously. We had to basically relearn how to do this.

Their mass notification capabilities change all the time. We get emails on practically a daily basis, and sometimes, many emails in the course of the day about changes and upgrades to their system, many of which do not impact us. For the ones that do not impact us, we get a message saying that they've changed their systems in Singapore. They're doing a lot of changes on an ongoing basis, and some of them do impact us.

It's not an investment that has been made for financial purposes. It's an investment that has been made to get the message out to people and certainly, the messages do get out. In that sense, we have seen an ROI.

It's fairly easy to learn and use. It has a lot of details, so you do need to pay attention to what you're doing. I'd advise asking a lot of questions because there are capabilities that are buried, and there have been times when we've only found out that something is available by asking about it.

I'd rate Everbridge Mass Notification a seven out of ten.

Anytime there is a major event—outages, weather situations, or things of that nature—we use the solution.

More people are in the know, especially when we have dangerous situations going on. Hospital-wide, people know about them. We have different facilities and this is a good communication tool to get information out. It gets to more people at one time, quickly, than any other platform.

If the health system I work for did not utilize this, it would risk not getting critical alerts out to the right people ASAP. And then, people wouldn't know if they're walking into a dangerous situation or if there are downtime procedures that they might need to utilize.

It has affected productivity in a good way and has saved us time. We typically have certain distribution lists, via email, and those notifications are not going to reach everyone at the same time. Instead of having to email certain groups of people, taking the time to type things up, you can just send an automated message out, either to certain groups or hospital-wide. Having to send messages out manually by email takes time and energy. It's easier to send out mass communication to everyone that a message needs to go to.

It can be utilized in different ways. There are different numbers that users can be called at. They can be sent messages. They can be sent calls to whichever number they have listed. It is a better way to get those communications out to people.

It will call and leave me a message, letting me know what's going on. I like the fact that it leaves automated messages about whatever the problem or alert situation is. It lets you know. That capability is valuable because people now tend to keep their phones with them, more so than anything else. They're more prone to listen to or see an alert coming through their telephone rather than via email.

If the user could personalize their dashboard a little bit more, that would be helpful.

Also, we were using Everbridge HIPAABridge, but we recently did away with that. Some things did not get to people in a timely manner. It was supposed to be just like text messaging, but sometimes providers received things late or not right away.

Because we were pleased with Everbridge Mass Notification, we went with HIPAABridge, which was the secure chat. But when they made changes to that platform, our health system wasn't pleased with it because there were a lot of things missing. HIPAA Bridge was good. It wasn't perfect, but it did what it needed to do. When they sunset that particular product or they rebranded it, they got rid of HIPAABridge and changed it to just Everbridge. And when that happened, the look changed and some of the functionality changed as well. Some things were taken away instead of things being added. 

Along with that change came glitchiness and delays, and it was not user-friendly. That is what made us get rid of it. And now, we use a different vendor for secure messaging and that product is easier to use.

I have been using Everbridge for over six years, as long as I've been in the health system.

I haven't personally had any problems with the technical support.

Positive

I can't speak about ROI in monetary terms, but when an alert goes out saying that "XYZ" is going to happen today, or is about to happen, or is happening, it gets people ready to do what they need to do. They'll know what their workflow is going to be, and in some cases, ahead of time. That way, they aren't just thrown into something. The staff or the health system will be aware that something is going on so that they can prepare for it.

It's gotten the job done and that's why we've kept it. It just does what it needs to do as far as alerting people goes. Especially in our department, if we have major or critical downtimes, Everbridge is how our health system is alerted. There are people who rarely check their emails and this is the tool that gets the job done when it comes to communication.

Multiple Solutions - One Vendor

It's preferable to use multiple products from the same vendor because there are cost savings involved when you do that. It's better to have one line for support instead of having to reach out to three different vendors. It's ideal to utilize one vendor for everything, if the solutions work. 

Using multiple features from Everbridge helped our organization with cost savings, at the time. It also created efficiencies at the time because we could go to the administrative dashboard if someone had an issue with passwords or needed a reset. There was just one dashboard and we could choose what we needed to do or where we wanted to go.

We are currently using Everbridge as our mass communication software for events considered emergencies or crises. I am responsible for mass notifications. We do use IT alerting as well, but I am responsible for the mass communications piece of emergency response.  

We use this software in the event of a crisis or an emergency, either weather-related or safety-related, and we use it globally. The emergencies and crises can be anything from a landslide to an earthquake to an active shooter to chemical spills and so on.  

For my particular role, the incident management piece is the most valuable. This is where we can set predefined templates with predefined contacts attached to those templates so that an operator can just pull up the template and send a message out to a contact list straight away.  

One place where Everbridge can be improved is its language libraries. It is weak on languages. Because we are trying to deploy it globally, it affects our usage across languages. They have some weaknesses in that area and it is really noticeable when trying to scale globally.  

We have been using this product within our organization for about 10 years.  

I would say the stability of the product is very good.  

We currently have over 150,000 contacts in the product database. As far as users, we have trained users who are actually the operators who are sending out the messages. I would say we have between 200 to 300 operators globally.  

I am not always pleased with the service level where we are receiving from the Everbridge technical support team. On a scale of one to ten, I would give them only a six or seven-out-of-ten. The technical support can definitely be improved and could be more consistent.  

I have been doing some ongoing exploratory research to find out what other software is on the market that has similar capabilities. I am looking at other products on the market that may be competing to see how they compare and to gauge user opinions.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this solution as an eight or nine-out-of-ten. I say that after reviewing some of the other products on the market. I have not been able to find anything that is decidedly better.  

The advice that I would give to others looking into implementing this product is that I would definitely recommend it for many organizations that do not need a global solution. If they do not need multiple language capabilities, it is something that can be deployed very quickly and it is a very good product. It needs some language tweaking. A good example of the limitations would be that online training is not available in multiple languages.  

Additional features that I would like to see in the next release of the Everbridge Mass Notification is really, mostly, additional language support. Also, there is one piece within the software that is called Scenarios which could be more fine-tuned. It currently needs some work to improve that functionality.  

Our primary use is for fire and EMS alerts to a group of rural subdivisions organized under the Firewise USA program and served by the Mendocino County Office of Emergency Services. Currently, Everbridge is used for emergency notifications and Nixle is being evaluated for close to real-time alerts and information updates.

It has been used successfully for large scale notifications as well as defined geographic area targeted notifications. The use of Nixle SMS service for incident notification and ongoing information is being discussed.

SAME and polygonal geographic targeting allow for localized mass notification which reduces communication volume.

Online training materials and support documentation could be improved.

An additional feature that should be included in the next release would be a contact database upload/download/sync.