If we can’t REACH you, we can’t ALERT you!

If we can’t REACH you, we can’t ALERT you!

Gallatin County has implemented a new mass notification system for our community to help ensure we get important information to you when you need it.  We are calling this tool the Community Notification System and it is provided by a long standing alerting company named Everbridge.  With this new system comes a lot of new options for emergency officials to quickly provide information to the community, however many of these new methods require you to opt in (a.k.a. give us the information on how to contact you).  To educate our community about the need for people to register to receive alerts we are launching the “If we can’t REACH you, we can’t ALERT you!” campaign.

The Details

When people visit the registration page they will be asked a series of questions.  Sometimes people wonder why all this information matters when they just want to be alerted.  Basically, the better the information we have the more accurate we can target our alerts to those who need the information.  In the Community Notification System you can enter a bunch of different contact methods from phone numbers, text messages, emails, apps and more – however it’s up to you to tell us how you prefer to be notified.  You will also be asked for at least one address and can enter more.  When we send alerts, we notify those who are affected instead of everyone in the county – the addresses you provide tell us what locations matter to you (don’t forget to add things like parents and work addresses).  We also give you the opportunity to provide optional information so we can further focus the message.  These are things like if you have livestock or are mobility impaired.  Once again this allows us to target messages to those affected by an incident that may have certain needs – like a place to relocate their livestock only to people with livestock.

The key here is the better the information you provide us, the better we will be able to provide information to you in an emergency.  Visit alerts.readygallatin.com for more information and to register.

The Challenge of Emergency Alerting in Our Modern World.

Gallatin County has had a mass notification system to quite a while.  Unfortunately the old system has become less relevant each year.  In the days when every house had a landline telephone we received those numbers from the telephone companies and the phone’s installation addresses.  Even with the limitations of a home phone requiring someone to be home, it was still a good tool.  Today many people do not have land line telephones.  In addition people communicate in a lot of different ways like email, texting, social media and more.  Not only are there a lot greater variety of communications methods, many are much quicker than automated individual phone calls.  However all these new tools introduce the challenge of people needing to provide us their contact information in order to receive alerts.  New tools are being developed each day, but know that the best way to ensure you receive important emergency alerts is to register yourself in our Community Notification System at Alerts.ReadyGallatin.com.