The vendor is required to provide that mass alert messaging and notification solution for counties, administered through county emergency management and county homeland security and emergency management.
- Licensing should allow curated use by municipalities inside the county
- Proposer should identify the number of administrators permitted.
- Proposed system should allow access for at least 75 users activating all types of alerts and notifications (including GIS mapping alerts), database maintenance, system maintenance, report queries, or whatever duties their assigned security level allows.
- The system should recognize authorized users and allow administrators to limit user access to appropriate security levels.
- The proposed system should assign the caller-id number and read-out for the outgoing calls based upon the individual phone number and name of the department/agency that is sending out the notification.
- The provider must be able to send voice messages to multiple types of devices (land-line telephone, cell phone), text messages to multiple types of devices, including e-mail and (teletype) TTY messages, and populate to social media platforms.
- The system annual fee must include a call bank of 700,000 minutes to draw down from for routine messaging. emergency messages should not be included in the bank of minutes. if calls are rounded up or down, the increments must be explicitly stated
- The system must be able to repeatedly attempt redials for all numbers where there is no answer.
- The system must be able to automatically extract home language from a citizen contact record and automatically deliver the messages in the appropriate language.
- The system must offer a text-to-text language translation.
- The system must provide translation to the following languages at a minimum:
• Arabic, Burmese, Chuukese, French, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Japanese, Lingala, Mandarin, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Taiwanese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, and Vietnamese.
- The system must be able to provide the user the ability to create and send a message from a simple platform.
- The system must be able to be pre-loaded with local government-specific scripts for tests, alerts, and other anticipated events
- The system must be able to record and archive messages for future delivery.
- The system must have the capability to create a polling function within messages that will create a response needed message to include questions and prompts for the recipient to answer by voice reply or by pressing a numeric key, by text if sent via SMS message, or by email. responses should be collected on a comprehensive report.
- When used to notify rosters:
• The proposed system should have the ability to query recipients regarding their availability and eta using automated prompts.
• The proposed system should include the capability to create and customize queries.
• The proposed system should have the ability to view message responses in real time.
• The proposed system should be capable of capturing feedback from automated prompts in comprehensive reports
- The system must have the ability to attach files such as, but not limited to, .PNG, .jpeg, or .pdf
- The system must provide access to the integrated public alert and warning system (IPAWS) and all IPAWS functionality, including wireless emergency alerting (wea), the emergency alert system (EAS), and enhanced non-weather emergency messages (NWEM) using the common alerting protocol (cap)
- The MNS shall be compliant with the most current edition of the federal emergency management agency (FEMA) IPAWS-open web-service interface design guidance.
- The system must provide on-line reports documenting notification results as well as other reports, such as monthly usage.
- The system should allow all mass notification report data to be updated in real-time and exported to a current version of microsoft excel or equivalent.
- The system must allow an unlimited number of county groups and subgroups to be created.
- The mass notification system should incorporate the use of a mapping tool that allows the user to designate a specific area to be notified.
- The system must allow users to target recipients using, at a minimum:
• Radius
• Free-form polygon
• GIS-generated boundary file
- The system must be able to provide automatic alerting for national weather service warnings.
- Technology and notification service requirements
1. System technology
• The proposed system shall be fully hosted by the vendor requiring no additional hardware, equipment, storage, etc. by the county.
• Proposer should provide a web-based system which provides the county the ability to access the system via a secure internet connection or mobile application from any computer, tablet, or smart phone in order to send out alerts and notifications.
• The provider must be able to support automated and secured contact data upload and updates from the customer’s existing employee database system or other public databases on a periodic basis.
• The provider’s system must be configurable to provide specific user rights, restricting data access and administrative oversight to the appropriate county government personnel.
2. Notification service – data acquisition and user sign up
• The provider must provide commercially available residential and business phone numbers and disclose where those numbers are generated from how frequently they are updated, and whether any fees are associated with updates.
a. The provider must have the ability to correlate the data imported from different databases to prevent duplication.
• The provider must append the latitude and longitude geo-coding information to these phone numbers and describe how frequently phone numbers/geo-codes are updated, and whether any fees are associated with updates.
• The provider must provide information on if they are an “opt-in” or “opt-out” service and a percentage of estimated population obtained from initial activation of the system.
• County citizens and businesses will need to have the ability to access a self-registration webpage, individual to each county, to provide required contact information and the best or most preferred way of notifying them should an emergency arise requiring the use of the system.
a. This citizen and business registration page will need to be accessible from each counties’ website, as well as other means, such as a designated qr code or social media link.
b. The vendor will need to provide assurances of data security and password protection of information once the citizen or business has performed this registration process.
3. Notification service – user capability
• The mass notification activation process must be easy to use and allow for a standard telephone, mobile application, and computer internet connection.
4. Mass emergency notification service level requirements
• This section presents the requirements for the county’s software and service standards.
5. Mass notification system security
• Provide a description of existing company policies, industry standards and procedures to ensure both notification system security and data transmission security.
• The provider must provide a description of their policy regarding storage, retention, and distribution of data.
• The provider must state the company non-release policy for data.
• Provider must describe the security features of the mass notification service that will prevent unauthorized access
• Provider must return all county-specific data and associated databases upon termination of the contract at no additional cost to county government.
6. Mass notification system redundancy
• The provider must describe all mass notification system redundancies and capabilities. for example, those found through the use of multiple telecommunications providers, multiple servers and across different power grids.
• The provider must describe its data backup policy and utilize mirrored server sites for disaster backup.
• The provider should describe its business continuity plan that allows failover to a redundant or backup disaster site with equal capability as the primary site.
• The mass notification service provider must state its recovery time for complete failover.
• The provider must be able to describe ongoing maintenance and system testing procedures.
• Provide whether any of your current customers have been unable to deliver notifications due to downtime on your system. please provide the cause of the outage, length of downtime, and how the situation was resolved.
7. Mass notification service capacity
• The provider must state the maximum mass notification service call capacity (voice messages to unique phone numbers) and corresponding message length on a per-hour basis.
• Please explain call volume capabilities and limitations.
• State what percentage of the provider’s available voice capacity is currently used on a daily average basis and the priority that will be assigned to the county should a mass event occur affecting multiple users of the platform in the area.
• The provider must also state its capacity for sending e-mail and text messages, how many can be
sent initially and grouped for sequencing.
• This information is for reference only.
8. Mass notification system reliability
• The provider must provide evidence of actual experience in successful call delivery during times of highly impacted capacity in the area being notified of an emergency
9. Customer support
• The provider must offer unlimited 24/7/365 (include 366 days during leap year) customer and technical support (including holidays) for all users through a toll-free phone number at no additional cost.
• The provider’s support time must be 15 minutes or less for all issues, at all times of day or night.
• The provider’s customer support personnel must be full-time, company-employed customer service professionals.
• The provider’s customer service staff must be located in the country.
• The provider must not outsource customer support to either a domestic or international call center(s).
• Upgrades, updates, and enhancements must be included in the annual service cost.
• Provider must detail its process for implementing upgrades and enhancements to the existing notification system and service.
- Contract Period/Term: 5 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: April 4, 2025