Everbridge Mass Notification Reviews

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.

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 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.

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.