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hey everyone welcome to our webinar mass notification incident communications our presenter today is Robert Honka senior Technical Sales Engineer at ever bridge we will be taking your questions at the end of the webinar I'm using the chat box at the bottom right hand corner of your screen and now I'm gonna turn things over to Raj all right excellent so I see a box on my screen hopefully I could minimize this thing here just a second ago it popped up can you see this the square box yeah yeah we can see that at the top of your screen there's all right hmm that's not letting me minimize this and I don't want to okay there we go now it's out of sight good excellent thank you alright everyone so my name is Raj Mohan I'm a sales engineer at every Bridge here and what I'm going to show you today is two ways to get communications out of our system mass notification and incident communications before I do I'm just going to very briefly talk about the platform itself we are a software as a service solution so it's everything's cloud-based you use a browser so you can be on a PC you can be on a laptop you can have a tablet walking around with it you can use your mobile phone which I'm showing here and at different points in the demo I'm a share out my phone so it's really a mobile solution you don't have to be glued in front of a screen to use this it's doing whatever you're doing and I always like to say that ever bridge is not necessarily anyone's day job you're all busy doing what you're doing when you need to send a communication you want to be able to have it set up in advance and ever bridge so it's very quick and very easy if you look at the top you'll see a number of different tabs I have a whole bunch of tabs because I'm logged in as the highest administrator but that may not be the case for you everything in our system is role based access control so you may have people with roles that limit them to only notification or a role that limits them to only incident communications likewise to get everything into the system can be fully automated we can do a synchronization with your HR system so if you have that contact data you can say once a week every night I want to automatically synchronize all of my employee information into a ver bridge that way you've got the latest and greatest information in here and you don't have to worry about it now you'll notice that I'm centered on the screen here I'm based outside of Boston and there's a bunch of dots and pictures here on the screen the key thing to keep in mind is that if that data that you bring in from your HR system or systems it could be plural that's also very common and you bring in that information about your employees it has hey here's where this employee works and hey optionally here's where that employee lives you can have all that information on the map and you can use that to send out a communication so for example I could draw a shape so I can draw something simple like a circle on the map it's going to highlight all of the people in that area I can click on the blue button over here for a new notification it's going to bring up the navigation here on the left I may not have to type in anything because I might have something ready in advanced or for example maybe something like building evacuation it's going to populate that it's going to go to the correct people I want as an option if I want I could set up a geofence or what we call an incident zone so I can say not only do I want to communicate with the people inside of that shape that polygon which by the way could be anything could be a circle could be a square rectangle could be the shape of a city a shape of a county state you could have pre-loaded shapes in there for your office Park or weather pattern so I can set up an incident zone and say hey if anybody enters this not just now but in the next week or two I want them to automatically receive this communication I can reach them many different ways and this is something that's completely configurable this is one of the strengths of ever bridge you can have many different delivery methods or ways of reaching your audience we actually have over 20 different ways you can reach people most of our customers will do let's say four to seven which is definitely better than kind of the manual method which might be one or two things I always say that if you have one or two ways of reaching people maybe you'll get them maybe you won't but if I've got four or five six ways I'm gonna get ahold of them those can be in any order those can be all at once or those can be spaced apart so you can say hey I want to try people on their mobile app and then give them a minute and if they don't confirm then I'm gonna send them an SMS and the SMS might look sort of like this and if they don't confirm after a minute maybe I'll send them an email and work our way down the list and if I've got six ways of reaching somebody and on method number three he or she confirms they're all done they're not going to see the remaining communication methods because they confirmed we call that confirm and quit and then finally below I can click send and send out that communication so as fast as I showed that to you you can reach people using the map you can do that on the fly or you can prepare for that in advance okay so let me talk now that I give that a little bit of an introduction about the two ways of reaching out to people one is a very simple method we call notification or mass notification and if I go in here to the tab you'll see we have the active history I can schedule this out in advance or make it recurring and I have some of my templates you'll notice on the map I didn't have to type in anything because I had text available ahead of time we call those message templates so if I look here at my notification templates I can bring up an example here I'm just going to click on the pencil icon here to edit it and you'll see that it's a very simple one-page form now that form is almost like putting together a letter or putting together an email I can determine do I want this to be high priority or not do I want to go through and well I should actually have a title for I can have a very simple SMS text message and you want to keep the SMS short and sweet and we even keep a count here of all the characters to make sure it doesn't get too lengthy I can hit the check box and also send out an email at the same time and because this is a rich text editor I can do whatever I want to in terms of the font and the color and I can go through and insert a photo their image of a map whatever you want to it's rich text our system can automatically do text-to-speech conversion so if someone can't handle text for whatever reason they have a desk phone a flip phone will read it out to them and if you don't like the robotic sound or the computer doing that you can upload your own a lot of our customers will upload the file like I'm showing here so maybe a given corporation has somebody who represents the voice of that company they could go ahead and do that and upload that audio file for different situations when you send out a communication you can send out a simple communication here's what happened you can send out a polling communication which might be something like asking them a question are you okay and then you could have different responses like yes I'm okay I'm not okay or I need immediate assistance or maybe I can provide help to others and of course you can have conference bridge communication our system comes out of the box with four conference bridges you can have up to 96 people on them with our advanced version you can have up to 250 people on a conference bridge you can have many of those you can customize it and of course you can have management of that and record the whole thing when you're done in an audio file I'm not going to go through all the different publishing options there's a ton of options here's the important thing when I send out a communication I can have a great deal of flexibility I can send that to individual people I can send back to groups or teams and keep in mind you don't have to reinvent the wheel and enter the stuff in a ver bridge whatever kind of folder hierarchy you have in your HR system automatically synchronize that in so we're a global company and we have country and region and department and team and sub team all that stuff's gonna be brought in automatically you can also use it we call Everage rules so rule is a type of logical filter I want to reach all my employees in Texas who are in the IT department who know how to speak Spanish the system will filter and reach all of those people and of course the fourth way to reach your target audience the recipients are using the map as I I'm not going to go over all settings I showed you lots of different ways to communicate with people I can send that out now I can send that at a future date or I can make that a recurring message and say hey every you know Friday and Saturday or something like that I want to send out this message you can always go ahead and do that so that's the basics of mass notification or what we call notifications it's very simple communication the key to it is you prepare the whole thing advance and you send it okay and when you do send it out you're going to receive the results back and you're going to get a pie chart so if you look on my right-hand side you can see this pie chart and actually what I'm going to do over here is click on this and you're going to see this in a larger image so the pie chart is nice because this is real-time I send out a communication within you know one or two minutes I'm gonna get back all of the information did somebody confirm did they not confirm what did they say and based upon that I can send the feedback so all of that it can be wrapped up in a PDF or you can go into our reporting tab and have all of the details there both in terms of standardized reports and customized reports so everything is being audited and logged by the system and we maintain this information for 18 months if you would like to archive information longer then just take a backup at month number 17 and keep doing that and and store your information as long as you'd like so that's the basics of what we call mass notification or notifications now we have another way of getting communication alcohol incident communication this does everything I just showed you before but what it also does is it gives you the ability to do some dynamic things so what I mean by dynamic things is at the time I'm sending out a communication I can go through and I can say hey right now here's the situation and I want to update what I'm sending out based on a couple little things and I can put that into my template and I don't necessarily need to type in all of that I may be able to have a drop-down so I'm gonna open up a template here for an activist eylandt this is like a generic situation for active shooter or maybe somebody has a knife or they're using a vehicle to run over people all kinds of crazy things out there and you'll notice that I put some comments in there three-phase polling condition there's a lot of neat stuff you can do with incidents think of incident communication as more advanced than mass notification and it can handle dynamic situations it's really a forms based structured way of sending out a communication so it might have a form that you fill out with a drop down so I don't have to type in something and that drop down is going to populate the outgoing message so if you look at the green squigglies there's an active shooter reported at building location and here's the suspect description and here's some details so when somebody is sending this out you can make it structured for them so they don't have to type in as much these things in this form the change that vary are called variables and you can see them here in the center you can have hundreds of variables and obviously we can help you put that together based upon what somebody selects in a form you can actually have logic in that template so you can have logic built-in that says hey if somebody sent out and said that this active shooter this active assailant was at headquarters send it to the headquarters team but if they were in Chicago send it to the Chicago team all that type of logic you can have built into the form and the nice thing is that the person who sends that form doesn't have to be aware of that it's all built in and it's all simplified for them another important distinction between incident communications and notifications is that not only can you have a little bit more structured with dropdowns and that dynamic information but you can also have very specific permissioning x' these people are allowed to see this these people are allowed to edit that these people allowed to change that you can get very very crystal clear you'll notice also here that I have this tab that says new another tab that says update with maybe a different information saying here's an update to this situation and then a tab that says all-clear close resolve because maybe later in the day that situation is completely resolved so you can have time-based phases it doesn't have to be three phases because this update you could do again and again and again so I could have four or five phases so something happened I'm gonna give you an update in two hours I'm gonna give you another update in four hours okay now it's been eight hours we're all clear and here's what's going on and all of those phases are built into one incident communication template and then the final thing I want to mention is that with incidents you also have the ability to wrap those things together multiple incidents together into a container for simplification that we call scenarios so for example I could say look we have a hurricane warning but I want to send this communication to the employees I want to send a completely different communication to my first responders my crisis team and I want to send a completely different communication to senior management to let them know everything's okay we've got the situation under control but all of those communications I want to hit one button and send that out and get all of that information out and you can do that with an incident so with one button I can launch multiple templates with different types of communication going to different audiences a great use case for these scenarios is multi-language maybe I have something I want to send out in different languages well guess what I click one button I'm gonna send out that information that communication to these people who speak English to this audience who speak Spanish and to this audience who speaks Chinese different messages going to different audiences all of its built ahead of time I click one button send it and it's out so this is an example of how powerful incident communications can be that they can go out to all of your recipients and as I mentioned before when they go out to people they can go out many different ways you can go out over SMS you can go out over email you can call them if you look at my phone here here's a mobile push example going out to someone's mobile phone so there's many ways you can reach people with either a very simple communication or a little bit more forms based structured communication so with that I will pause and I will take any questions that you might have about mass notification or incident communications hi everyone so if you want to type in any of your questions into the chat box at the bottom of your screen okay so we have our first question can we send two groups in both notifications and incidents absolutely when you send out a communication you can go to individuals you can go to groups and once again that can be based on the information you synchronize you don't have to put that in here you can go to a logic what we call ever bridge rules that works for both mass notification and for incident communications thank you so our next question is under notifications there are two types of templates what's what's a message template so when I showed you before going on the map here and I drew a little shape on the map right like for example I drew a little shape and tha
reached certain people and I said click on new notification I didn't have to type in stuff because I had text I it was basically just text that's something we call a message template whereas a full-blown communication is called a notification template so message is just the message just the text it's just a convenience it's very convenient for this it's also convenient for doing it on a mobile phone but the full-blown template is called a notification template site so next question is can we have two-way communications to large groups with one communication absolutely so you can do that two-way communication or what we call polling and you can do that either with mass notification or with incidence both of these you can do that with an individual person you can do that with a large group for example every single employee in the organization and you can do that with any kind of logical rule or filter that you would like great so our next question is can we support more than three phases for incidents yes so when I showed you before it's basically a new message an update and then you kind of close it out or resolve it and that update you could hit multiple times so if I wanted to I could have ten phases right I could send something out when this bad thing just happened and then I can send out an update eight times every hour and then close the thing out at our number nine or whatever completely up to you great so our next question is can you upload Excel documents with contacts into every Bridge absolutely so there's multiple ways to automate getting information into our system so I'm going to go into the contacts tab here and you can we have a template that shows you what it should look like and then you can upload into the interefere bridge here a comma delimited spreadsheet of all of the information both for regular contacts and even for dynamic stuff you do not have to do that that's one way to do it a lot of our customers will completely automate this process using our secure file transfer or using our REST API so that it's basically hands-off if you have an IT department there they can set this up so you know every night every week you set it up once and then it's hands-off and it's just always going to upload that information into the system other questions and other questions yes yes there are sorry about that under notifications there oh sorry we I think we answered that one [Music] just having a little technical difficulty with the questions hang on one second great so another question is how do we upload our contacts into ever bridge here as I showed you in the contacts tab there's an uploads area and you can bring it in a comma delimited spreadsheet but like I said for a production situation what people like to do is automate it so you can use our secure file transfer and or you can use our REST API and have somebody in your IT department I have a little script that runs and automates that so it doesn't need to be any human touch you can set this up once and then after that on a regular basis once again every night multiple times a day once a week whatever your schedule you want it's going to take the data from your HR system or systems and upload that into a ver bridge great another question is could you show the user profiles and what each is expected to provide before an event so what you want to do is get your your contacts we call it contacts when we say user we mean something like it's going to be somebody who's administrative in the system so I'm going to bring up my contact record and show you this there's really only four mandatory pieces of information that must come from your HR system everything else is extra so if you look here with this Asterix is my first name my last name some type of external ID some companies have a number or sometimes they just use the email and then record type which is typically going to be employee but you could imagine it could be contract or visitor temp whatever that's it those are the four mandatory pieces of information outside of that I can have my country time zone I can have a whole bunch of different ways to reach me I can have different locations where I am my office my home etc all different types of dynamic information travel information I could have recall additional information like here's my job title here's my call centre other types of information so it's really things that you want to set up ahead of time and not think about that in terms of communication but think about here's all the good data to have from my HR system or systems into ever bridge souls that when something happens we have many different ways of reaching people great another question is where where do I find secure file transfer so this is really kind of a back-end thing I don't know if you know we want to get into this but in the settings of the system at the higher level basically what we call the organization level I'm down to the aura at the at the org level organizationally but the higher level the account level is where we'll have settings for secure file transfer and also the options for the API but that's something once again that that you can set up in advance and an automate that great another question is is there a character limit on SMS yeah so we don't we don't put the limitation on SMS this is basically the industry protocol right so we send it out it's gonna go out and it's gonna be limited by I forget what it is 140 characters or something that's just a global standard for SMS so whenever bridge sends out of communication it leaves our cloud and it goes out to the world right it goes out to the telco network it goes out to the SMS aggregators it goes to the mobile carriers they have their own limitations but what we do is we provide information to the person putting together the template to say hey don't write a book in the SMS because it's going to get chopped up into pieces and the SMS aggregator could potentially get those pieces delivered to your audience out of order so you always always want to keep your SMS short and sweet not just because of technical limitations but because people these days have zero attention span so when something bad happens I'm an employee I want to know with one or two sentences don't don't make me read a lot I just don't have the patience for it if I do want to read I can go and I can check out the email that you send also and I can look at that later today and by the way the email might also have an attachment with a word doc in a PDF that's got 20 pages of background information and I can look at that next week okay so another question is do you need a computer to access the mass notification checking results no so you can use your mobile phone so we have a capability on the mobile phone I'll show you right here so there's an app on the mobile phone called the ever bridge which is really for receiving communications you can also do what we call an unsolicited message or see something say something but primarily for administration we have something called manage bridge okay and manage bridge as you can imagine you log in to it and from here I can get a crunch down view of notifications and in sense I can pick out a template I can make a little change I can send that out and then I can see all the results so do I need to be in front of a computer no I can do this entire thing from my mobile phone so I always like to say I can be on a boat on the lake I can take out my phone launch a communication out to 20,000 people get the results back in 60 seconds 120 seconds and I got the whole thing on my phone great another question is if you have contacts from multiple organizations can they manage their own profile and how they wish to be notified yes so if you look at the top here I've got a set up here for our Sales Engineers with lots of different organizations so in your company you can have the high level account which would be like XYZ company and then you could have a whole bunch of different subcategories which we call organizations so for example it could be you know the East Coast division the West Coast division it could be you know this state that state or the IT department that I mean you could break it down very very granular and within each of those organizations or orgs as we call them you can have people with different roles and different permissions so you can see here I'm an organization administrator the highest level capability but I could have something much less than that and then I could go through and and that could determine what I can see and what I can do so everything in the system is role based access control and you can get very very specific with that if you would like to great another question is is so when there when you show scenario is under incidence is that a part of all all versions of the system or just the surgeons no Sedaris is part of incidents and that's just that's just part of it great thank you and then another question is is there a maximum number of contacts you can upload it's not that I'm aware of we've got some gigantic customers you know we've got the entire state of New York State we've got Florida we've got huge swathes of you know California Texas we've got international customers you know I've no I don't think there's a limitation you know if you look at my system to demo system I used to keep over a million in here just to make it a bit more realistic I deleted a bunch and I got myself down to one hundred eleven thousand I don't think it's possible for anybody to overload us I mean we've notified people during hurricanes we've notified like 20 million people in three days so no great thanks ROG that's all the time we have for questions today but we will follow up with you and answer your question individually if we didn't have a chance to get to it during the session thank you for attending our webinar and have a great rest of your day thanks everyone goodbye
