Mass Notification System

The Vendor is required to provide mass notification system that can deliver time-sensitive voice (landline and cellphone), SMS, and email messages to the entire city or designated sub-populations, including residents and businesses in designated geographic areas, and those who wish to receive information in languages other than English.
- Requirements
A. System infrastructure & security
1. Full system web-based access by multiple authorized users
• Authorized staff users must be able to access the system via any internet connection and through an appropriately secure, password-protected portal with two-factor authentication or comparable security verification.
• The system must allow access for at least 15 individual authorized user accounts of different access/administrator levels.
2. System redundancy
• Solution should have a geographically redundant system/server(s) to prevent single-point failure.
3. Data security
• The system should be comprehensively secure, and data should be stored and protected in accordance with applicable federal and state laws.
• The vendor should treat all data, including contact data, with the highest degree of confidentiality.
• Data should be appropriately protected from reselling or any other form of exploitation and should not be disclosed to any third party without prior written authorization from the city.
- Voice messaging
1. High speed calling
• The city expects to be able to call up to 150,000 households and businesses within ten minutes using a robust and reliable system, achieving an average call rate of at least 250 voice contacts per second.
2. Accurate sensing of voicemail and answering machine signals
• The system should sense a live respondent or answering machine and leave clear and complete voice messages (up to at least 3 minutes in length) when a live respondent is unavailable or provide successful options for respondents to confirm receipt and therefore terminate additional messaging attempts.
3. Effective use of commercially available phone lists
• Supply current contact data but expects the vendor to provide regularly updated phone data from the best and most comprehensive residential and business listings currently available from commercial sources, including information for landline, VoIP and, as possible and practical, cellphones.
• This data should be regularly updated (at least once per year).
4. City-specific phone number and caller id
• The system should display a distinct city-selected phone number as the caller id for voice notification.
• This city-specific phone number should also serve as the callback number.
- Message creation, targeting, & delivery
1. Multilingual capability
• With a large population of non-English speakers, the city must be able to use the system to communicate with several thousand residents in the following languages (at a minimum): Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian-creole, Nepali, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Cantonese, and mandarin.
2. Sub-group capability
• The system must allow for the creation of contact sub-groups within the overall contact database, and independent targeting of these sub-groups to receive messages.
3. Message creation & formatting
• Message creation must be efficient, straightforward, and user-friendly under stress. Message design should allow for custom formatting, including links, bolding, multi-color text, bullet and sub-bullet points.
4. Message templates
• The system should allow authorized staff users to create, save, edit, and send city-specific, customized message templates.
5. Message delivery
• A notification must be able to target map areas, one or more sub-groups, and multiple message channels at once.
• Messages must be able to be scheduled for a future sending time.
• The system must be able to deliver different messages to different contact selections simultaneously, as well as identify and remove duplicate contact information from a message as it is sent.
• Authorized staff users should be able to terminate an in-progress message at any time to immediately stop further contact attempts.
6. Mobile application
• A mobile application should be available to serve as an additional channel for subscribers to receive notifications (in addition to standard mass notification delivery channels of voice, email, and SMS).
• Customizable branding capabilities for the mobile app is strongly preferred.