Mass Notification Solution

The Vendor is required to provide hosted SaaS mass notification solution that could be used by dep to notify employees and the public (opt-in) of emergency and non-emergency alerts and notifications throughout the state.
- Technical requirements
• Annual subscription price for access to all SaaS resources should include maintenance and upgrades.
• Log-in to the SaaS system 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year from any device.
• “Identify and brand” messages and corresponding webpage messages and templates.
• Turn the texting function on/off by dep.
• A “discovery” capability for all text messaging. (public records request)
• Use a custom short message service (SMS) message with high-character limitation.
• Include a link to the end of SMS messages to enable recipients to view the entire message as a webpage message.
• Escalate notifications to ensure that the next method (secondary) or person and group is notified if the primary method or first person and group does not timely acknowledge response.
• Build events for one-click sending during incidents.
• Set up notification templates with predetermined contact lists and pre-defined messages for faster communications in a crisis.
• Broadcast messages to any communications device, including desktop alerts.
• Support multi-platform smart phones and tablets, including apple® iOS and android™ devices. Resend notifications to recipients or send follow up messages to all or a sub-set of recipients for tracking within the same incident or event.
• Put dep management and operating structure into multiple notification environments.
• Separate by geography, department and function, building or other criteria.
• Automatically publish notifications to public websites, intranets, internal systems and social media.
• Manage settings, limits and defaults through an administrator interface.
• Have multiple administrator roles.
• Import, organize and categorize data.
• Sync the data on a regular schedule to ensure the contact list and information is accurate and current.
• Set opt-in portals to either publicly available or private (invitation only) and allow contacts to opt-in, update and manage their accounts – including contact information, locations they care about, alert preferences and more- through branded, customizable web-based portals.
• To automate bulk, partial and full updates utilizing a secure, industry standard method for data transfer.
• Define role-based access controls for managing separate user and contact data.
• To notify contacts and manage contact data across multiple distributed data stores and groups from a single access point.
• Include multiple groups and custom fields from internal systems to help with message targeting.
• Communicate with multilingual text-to-speech support.
• Send notifications with customized caller id’s (dep branding) so that the number is local and familiar to the call recipient.
• Interactive survey - phone and web-enabled surveys with multiple questions and responses interactive conference call.
• Interactive conference call - message recipients can join a live conference call after the voice message has finished playing.
• Meet the standards for regulatory requirements and handling of personally identifiable information.
• Support accessibility guidelines - public and private portals are section 508 of the rehabilitation act of 1973, as amended in 1998 compliant and include field-level view/read/write access controls.
• Analytic and reporting capabilities.
• Accurate incident analyses in real-time.
• Provide summary and detailed notification analysis (DNA) reports for after-the-event.
• Ability to run reports with off-line creation of pivot tables and cross-referencing.
• Ability to create reports and analyze data.
- Minimum notification requirements
• Use of the system shall not be governed by number of minutes, messages, increments or credits.
• Accomplish mass notification of the public via phone (landline, VoIP and wireless), native SMS via SMPP and mms messaging, email, and really simple syndication (RSS).
• The system shall be able to send messages through each of these mediums simultaneously.
• For notification methods where the sent message exceeds the allowed number of characters the system shall intelligently detect and provide an alternate mechanism for the recipient to view the complete message, such as a webpage message.
• All text/SMS messaging shall be short message peer-to-peer (SMPP) messaging via cellular network gateway providers.
• To reduce the possibility of notification messages being handled as spam, the vendor must have an established SMPP short code that whitelisted with the major us commercial cellular carriers.
• Simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) text messaging, or any portion of the user profile that requires a user to specify their mobile carrier, does not meet this requirement.
• Be accessed by message originator for the purpose of launch and utilization via a computer with internet connection, smart phone, mobile app and phone to record and schedule calls.
• Mobile apps shall be designed specifically for their respective device and platform and must support visual geographic information system (GIS) map-based notifications.
• Enable message originators to specify whether recipients must acknowledge human receipt of a message.
• If confirmed receipts are requested, the system must continue trying to reach the recipient until positive confirmation has been received with human acknowledgement.
• Once acknowledgement has been received, the system will cease all further attempts to reach that recipient.
• Message originators to enable a timeout option for notifications, at which time notification attempts will cease, even if a user has not been successfully contacted.
• For weather notifications, this timeout window should default to the expiration of the product issued by the national weather service.
• Jurisdiction administrators to use a system default or create a jurisdiction level caller id and send-from email address to outgoing notification recipients.
• Outgoing notification messages to contain photo, video, audio attachments and links.