City of New Orleans and State of Iowa Join Growing Trend to Improve Emergency Communications by Deploying Rave Alert
FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Rave Mobile Safety (Rave), the critical communication and collaboration platform customers count on when it matters most, announced that the City of New Orleans and the State of Iowa have adopted Rave Alert to replace legacy emergency mass notification systems, and are among 260 new deployments in the first months of 2021.
Rave Enhances Mass Notifications for City of New Orleans and State of Iowa
New Orleans will use the Rave platform to power its “NOLA Ready” alerting system. This deployment will allow residents to simultaneously sign up for NOLA Ready alerts, subscribe to alerts from the Governor’s Office, Louisiana Department of Health and other State agencies and create a Smart911 Safety Profile. These profiles provide 9-1-1 operators and first responders with instant critical information used to inform emergency response.
“In New Orleans, we’ve faced many challenges over the last few years,” said Collin Arnold, Director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (NOHSEP). “With each storm, every special event and over the course of the pandemic, we’ve seen the importance of providing safety information directly to residents as soon as possible. Upgrading and enhancing NOLA Ready with Rave Alert will give our responders ease of use and give our residents the information they need when it matters most.”
In Iowa, officials will use Rave Alert to communicate with residents about extreme weather, civil unrest, public health and safety concerns, bulletins for dangerous situations and safety notifications for county fairs or festivals. Iowa will also use the Rave platform for communication between state and county offices. Rave Alert replaces the current system and will allow for customization, such as multilingual translations or population segmentation.
“Between the pandemic, extreme weather and local events, it became clear we needed a streamlined and customizable way to share updates with residents across the State of Iowa at a moment's notice," said Paul Trombino, Director of the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. “Our statewide deployment of Rave Alert allows State and county officials to quickly notify the community and confidently deliver the right message to the right people when it matters most.”
In both New Orleans and Iowa, subscribers can set notification preferences for where they receive alerts (SMS text, push notification, email or voice message) and for the type of alert, ranging from emergency alerts, COVID-19 updates and special event and traffic updates.
Rave Alert fosters greater interactivity between officials and alert recipients, improving both disaster preparedness and emergency response. It is easy to deploy, customizable and includes features like multilingual translations, polling, geo-targeted alerts and two-way messaging. From everyday usage to a catastrophic event, state and local agencies can get urgent updates to their communities quickly when seconds count. The solution is FedRAMP authorized, providing further evidence of Rave’s public safety-grade infrastructure and adherence to stringent security standards, including a commitment to 99.999% availability.
These deployments of the Rave platform are the latest examples of Rave’s growing collaborative safety ecosystem. The company further expanded that ecosystem in the past quarter through new partnerships and support of statewide safety legislation alike.
Rave Supports Compliance to Virginia’s Marcus Alert Act
Rave also worked with communities across the Commonwealth of Virginia to support their compliance with Virginia’s Marcus Alert System, which established a statewide mental health awareness response and community understanding services.
The Marcus Alert legislation requires every locality in Virginia to establish a voluntary database available to the 9-1-1 alert system and the Marcus alert system to provide mental health information and emergency contact information for response to an emergency or crisis by July 1, 2021. Smart911, Rave’s national service that allows individuals to provide 9-1-1 call takers and first responders with critical information through a Safety and Vulnerable Needs Profile, addresses the legislation’s requirement.
“From ensuring every resident in a state can receive urgent and targeted critical communications, to improving the quality of data local agencies rely on for greater situational awareness and better response, our clients are leveraging our technology to create truly collaborative safety ecosystems,” said Todd Piett, Rave CEO. “We are excited to play a role in improving safety by working closely with those tasked with protecting our communities on their most pressing safety and critical communication challenges.”
Rave Establishes First-in-the-Nation Partnership for Fully Validated 9-1-1 Location Data
To improve the quality of data public safety agencies rely on to accurately target critical mass notification recipients, Rave has also partnered with GeoComm, a leading provider of Public Safety Location Intelligence®. This partnership will bring to market a first-in-the-nation seamless integration of authoritative and fully validated 9-1-1 location data into Rave Alert. Rave and GeoComm expect general availability of their integrated solution this summer.
Thousands of communities and organizations in the U.S. and abroad count on Rave’s solutions to protect their populations and coordinate safety responses. To learn more about Rave Mobile Safety, visit www.ravemobilesafety.com.
About Rave Mobile Safety
Rave Mobile Safety is the leading provider of critical communication and collaboration technology used to save lives, manage crisis incidents and increase resiliency. From major disasters and crisis events to everyday emergencies and operational incidents, the Rave platform enables critical data sharing, mass notification and emergency response coordination. Over 8,000 first responder, emergency management, 9-1-1, and federal, state and local agencies—as well as corporations, healthcare organizations, universities and schools—all rely on Rave to prepare better, respond faster, recover quicker and mitigate anticipated critical incidents. Founded in 2004, Rave’s award-winning software solutions are backed by leading growth equity firm TCV. Let Rave enable you to do all you can todayTM to keep everyone safe. For more information, visit https://www.ravemobilesafety.com, read our company blog, and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
