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KEEPING IT FRESH. Hyper-Reach: Relentless Pioneers in Emergency Notification

You may not be aware of just how innovative we are at Hyper-Reach, but we have a long history of “firsts” in Emergency Notification!

  • first to offer a hosted mass notification system
  • first to send a message to be broadcast by IPAWS
  • first to fully automate weather notifications
  • first to provide specific local caller-ID for voice notifications
  • first to provide conferencing/ call-forwarding options
  • first to provide managed recipient response options
  • first to reply with last message sent in response to *66 calls and “missed call” callbacks
  • first to provide community sign-up via Phone/Text to same #
  • first to offer the most accurate geo-targeting by combining the most current data with Google maps functionality

I know that’s not even all of them…  that’s just off the top of my head. In some of these cases it’s not just “first” but is still “only” and a good number of these features are still not available with most, if not all, of our competitors.

Now we don’t brag a lot, and we don’t advertise a lot. It’s more our style to build relationships with our clients and find personal ways to make connections. It may be a little bit slower that way, and we may not be the biggest vendor in our space, but we have an excellent offering, and by keeping our costs down, we can offer our clients a better value than they will find elsewhere. We’ll never be too big for our britches.

You may have seen this quote on our brochures or proposals:

OUR COMMITMENT:

We never compromise our standards. Determined to remain the easiest-to-use full-featured emergency mass notification service, we are committed to treating our customers with speed, intelligence, and courtesy.

And we mean it.  

So we listen to our clients when they tell us what they’d “like to have” and if it makes sense on a broader scale, we incorporate it into our platform.  Sometimes we even come up with an idea or two of our own!

We are always adding new features and tools, improving existing ones, and developing some pretty neat stuff to make your lives easier when sending out notifications, and give you added functionality so you can get more value out of your Emergency Notification System. Here are just a few of the most recent additions.

Dynamic Lists:  Eliminating the need to manage group lists, your dynamic lists will update themselves!  So much easier than having to maintain your internal group lists.

Hyper-Reach Launch:It’s easier than 1-2-3… now you can launch and track your notifications quickly and easily from your iOS or Android device, no matter where you are.

Pop-Ups:Community members can respond to pop-up suggestions on your web site, to opt-in for pop-up notifications.  Quick and easy and extends your reach.

Message Templates:Talk about getting a message out fast!  Our new Message Templates allow you to grab and go – just fill in the blanks with the details and send it out!

If you’d like to learn more and see these features and others in a live web demo, we’d love to give you a closer look! Just request our demo here.

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Increasing role of Emergency Notification System

Recent years have been memorable for large and increasingly damaging wildfires in California, Washington and other western states and destructive hurricanes in Texas, Puerto Rico, North Carolina and Florida.

It has been over a month since hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas but its impact is still being felt, and will be for some time. The storm set a new rainfall record in North Carolina and left about 1 million people without power.  A few weeks later, category 4 hurricane Michael caused 19 deaths in four states as of Tue, Oct. 16. Former National Hurricane Center (NHC) head Rick Knabb said: “Michael could be one of the worst hurricanes to ever strike the Florida Big Bend/Florida Panhandle region”.

Some experts believe that natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes and flooding are likely to become more frequent and severe in the future. Which is all the more reason to do everything we can to prepare for such severe weather events.

As an emergency notification provider, we are aware of the difficulties Emergency Managers deal with during natural disasters. One of the biggest challenges is in notifying the community quickly and effectively about the dangers, and providing citizens with important up-to-date information and instructions.

With a growing number of severe weather events, more and more Emergency Managers rely on their emergency notification systems (ENS) to notify the public, since they can reach thousands of people in just minutes with potentially life-saving information and instructions. But even if you have an ENS in place it’s only half the battle. It’s critical that you get as many  of your citizens as possible to sign up for emergency alerts, since the vast majority of people no longer use landlines.

Experience shows that the number of subscribers goes up after a major emergency has already happened and caused big damage or even loss of lives. It’s unfortunate that it takes a catastrophe to get people’s attention, but to some degree that’s just human nature. On the other hand, it is still a great opportunity to raise your community enrollment rate before another emergency strikes.

That’s why it’s so important to use all the means available to you to enroll your community members. It’s important to make sure they have all the options presented to them, and that you don’t give up on getting them enrolled. Let them sign up in a way they’ll feel comfortable with.  One of the groups at greatest risk is the elderly, which is why it’s so important to give them options that work for them.

Here are some of the other most common obstacles holding people back from registering with your emergency notification system:

  • Ignorance: Some simply are not aware that you have a notification system in place and that they need to register if they want to receive emergency alerts.
  • Language barrier: They may not know that alerts are available in their own language.
  • Difficulty:  The registration link is hard to find.
  • Time restraints:  The registration process is too lengthy or complicated.
  • Fear of too many notifications:  They don’t want irrelevant or unnecessary notifications and don’t want to be awakened during late night hours

Hyper-Reach offers a number of enrollment methods to help its clients to develop a successful outreach campaign.  When all the options are utilized effectively, we find our clients can greatly increase their enrollment rates.

Hyper-Reach is also seamlessly integrated with FEMA’s IPAWS technology, allowing authorized clients to use IPAWS WEA messages to fill in the gaps so they can reach just about all the residents and visitors in an affected area, even if they haven’t registered for emergency alerts or are just passing through the affected community.

Find out more about how Hyper-Reach goes above and beyond in helping you enroll your community. Request a demo now.