town’s community relations office.
After registering for the service, users can then select
the types of notifications they wish to receive. Of course,
every subscriber signs up to receive emergency notices, and
pretty soon through an agreement with a couple of vendors and
Virginia Tech, all Blacksburg citizens with land line telephone
service will receive emergency notices, whether or not they are
signed up for Blacksburg Alert.
In addition to the comfort of being
notified about emergencies, users of Blacksburg Alert are also
finding solace in knowing when to register for parks and
recreation programs; when brush collection is happening in
their neighborhood; when changes are occurring to the local bus
schedule; or simply when development projects and public
hearings are taking place. Town officials have also
begun using Blacksburg Alert to notify parents when area
schools are closing early. This has been of particular benefit
to working parents who are unable to tune into local radio
stations at work and are otherwise unaware that their children
are being sent home. Every day, Blacksburg Alert is used to
notify citizens of the basic services and community projects
that affect them the most.
Once the user selects the types of
notices that interest them, the next step is to select the
preferred notification medium. Blacksburg Alert can send
coordinated messages by telephone, cell phone, TTY, e-mail,
pda, fax, or a combination of each.
VALUED SERVICE
Many citizens value the service
because of its immediacy and reliability, and town staff sees
the benefits of Blacksburg Alert through efficiency and ease of
information sharing. Notices are entered once into a Web based
interface and dispersed to all communication devices
simultaneously. The days of sending an e-mail, then making a
phone call, followed by a fax are over. Blacksburg Alert makes
it possible through the click of one button. And in the event
of an emergency, being able to disseminate information to
citizens, the media, and state and local agencies instantly is
a critical component made easy by Blacksburg Alert.
Convergent technology is by far the
greatest benefit to government communicators. It simplifies a
complicated and time consuming task, arms citizens with the
information needed to participate in the public processes, and
allows them to take advantage of local government services.
One of the added benefits of Blacksburg
Alert is that it
allows for better internal communication.
Through an easy to use administrative interface, police
department and public works administrators are able to call out
crews for emergency or weather related events, and departments
like the Blacksburg Transit can use the system to call drivers
to take on shifts. Before Blacksburg Alert, dispatchers would
contact employees by telephone one person at a time.
Blacksburg Alert resides on a
scalable platform and can accommodate inbound as well as
outbound communications. In the future, a customer response
module will be integrated into the system allowing citizens
telephone access to the town’s website and hundreds of
service related messages. A feature called GeoAlert will
also be added in the coming months allowing notifications to be
targeted to specific geographic areas of town.
The return on investment for Blacksburg
Alert is applicable in many contexts:
• Efficient Infrastructure –
because the Web based system integrates with the town’s
infrastructure, there was less hardware and software,
correlating to lower start up expenses for all parties.
• Efficient Administration –
the ability to send one message to multiple devices
dramatically lessens the amount of time that administrators
would otherwise need to spend working across disparate systems
to send a single message.
• Multiple Services Rendered –
Blacksburg Alert provides priority messaging for emergency
situations, but allows the town to use the underlying
technology and infrastructure to improve everyday services for
their citizens.
Making information dissemination
efficient for staff and various types of information retrieval
easy for our citizens is what it’s all about. Blacksburg
Alert has truly reinvented the service of government
communication. 
For more information:
Heather D. Browning
Blacksburg Community
Relations Director
Relations Director
300 South Main Street
Blacksburg, VA 24062
(540) 961-1199
jbpwmomg@blacksburg.gov
www.blacksburg.gov