It’s no secret that many state and local budgets are getting hammered by Covid-19 and its aftereffects. Most states are suffering revenue cuts of 1% to 10% or more. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Policy analysts estimate state and local revenue losses due to the coronavirus pandemic will total about $300 billion through fiscal year 2022, though that doesn’t include rising expenses.” And those “rising expenses” can be significant, including mitigation efforts associated with Covid, such as ventilation systems, sanitizing protocols, etc.
So most agencies within state and local governments are, or should be, under considerable budget pressure. Which drives many of them to look for savings, even if it’s not their budget on the chopping block. After all, if an agency can find savings for their community – savings that don’t sacrifice their mission or important functionality – why wouldn’t they act on that?
Which takes us to our favorite topic: mass notification services. Because if you’re using one of our major competitors, such as Everbridge or Onsolve (aka CodeRed), Hyper-Reach can save you big money. And while you might worry that switching to a lower cost service could lose you functionality, reliability or something else, the reality is that Hyper-Reach probably provides everything you care about, and gives you added features you can’t get from our competitors.
Much of what local governments spend on mass notification is public record, so we can say with confidence that switching to Hyper-Reach is likely to save you real money. And if it doesn’t save you money, switching will probably still get you more for your money.
How much can we save you? That depends on the size of your community and which company you’re using. But based on our research, the average cost of emergency alert systems across the US is about $0.45 per person. So an average county would spend about $46,000 a year on an emergency alert system, while an average municipality would spend about $7,600. And we can save that average county more than $11,000 and the average town about $2,000.
And because of the way that many mass notification companies price their services, we might save you a lot more than that. Because you could be paying a lot more than the average. Our analysis shows that some communities are paying much more per capita than their neighboring counties or cities.
Even if we can’t save you total dollars, you could be getting much more from Hyper-Reach than your current provider. For example, most emergency notification providers charge extra for automated weather alerts; we include them standard. We also include IPAWS, unlimited social media feeds, unlimited administrative users and other features at no additional charge.
And we have features that no one else provides. Our latest is AlertSmart™, the only emergency alert system that delivers notifications through Amazon Alexa devices.
We’re also the mass notification system that’s most focused on helping you reach the mass of your citizens. Which is why we offer more ways to register than any other company, and more help in getting your residents to sign up. Which is why we’ve hit registration levels in some communities of up to 30%, while most of our competitors are lucky to reach 10%.
How well do we deliver on all of these claims? There’s only one way to find out: schedule an online demonstration and see for yourself.
