State Emergency Management Agency

Challenge

A state emergency management agency began its partnership with OnSolve® for the purpose of sending critical communications to its residents. This included all types of crises, from severe weather warnings to terrorist attacks to residential gas leaks. When the COVID-19 outbreak began, the partnership with OnSolve became even more essential to the agency’s mission.

Throughout the pandemic, OnSolve has played a vital role in providing real-time updates to the state’s residents. Once the vaccine became available, this role expanded to include appointment management and follow-up. Targeted messaging ensured residents were made aware of extreme weather events, so they could quickly reschedule vaccine appointments, as necessary. This functionality grew in value as the vaccine became more widely available to residents aged 16 years and older.

Once accessibility expanded to include residents who are 12 to 15 years old, the agency needed more support than ever. Coordinating the logistics of vaccine deployment for the state’s residents required a platform that is rapid, effective and reliable.

Solution

Officials can exchange crucial vaccine information with their community easily and efficiently in real time. A key feature of the capabilities provided by OnSolve includes communicating vaccine eligibility and ensuring a clear understanding of who is eligible and when. This helps to minimize confusion at the vaccination sites and ensures a smooth distribution process.

OnSolve has also played a critical role in communicating with residents when critical events such as extreme weather have impacted vaccine appointments. Through targeted communications, OnSolve Critical Communications helped to quickly inform residents of appointment changes and reschedule vaccinations during times of severe winter weather across the state, ensuring residents’ safety.

Specifically, the Agency was able to:

Send rapid, targeted and easy-to-understand communications directly to mobile and landline devices

Only the people who need an alert will receive it. Agency officials can view their residents’ eligibility status and send notifications and instructions that correspond to upcoming scheduling requirements. Geo-targeted alerting and notification technology powered by ESRI® ensures alerts are always relevant.

Deliver essential information to impacted communities in real time

As residents become eligible for the vaccine based on their age or health conditions, it’s important that they’re notified in a timely manner. Once an appointment has been scheduled, extreme weather events can result in cancellations, causing further complications. The OnSolve solution is a fully redundant system and takes both factors into account. Even when other communications systems go down in a storm, users still receive timely alerts that allow them to reschedule their first and second shots, as necessary.

Send alerts via multiple modalities

Reach everyone, everywhere, via any channel: voice, email, SMS, Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) and more. Critical Communications allows officials to generate messages in multiple formats and create settings in advance, so alerts are delivered to recipients in their preferred format, automatically. With OnSolve, officials gain peace of mind knowing life-saving vaccine information has been delivered and received.