The City of New Orleans, the State of Iowa and Hamilton County, Indiana have replaced their legacy emergency mass notification systems to improve emergency communication within their communities.

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 the platform 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. The platform 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.

In Hamilton County, Ind., the platform will aid with vaccine distribution by allowing local hospitals as well as state run sites to quickly confirm availability, fill open appointments and ultimately get vaccines into arms faster, without wasting doses

The platform helps foster greater interactivity between officials and alert recipients, improving both disaster preparedness and emergency response by making it easy to deploy, customizable and including 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.