Building and Maintaining a Public Sign-up Database
Posted by Nicky Miller on Mon, May 03, 2010 @ 08:24 AM
Developing your public sign-up database for your emergency notification system can be a struggle. Building your database starts with creating public awareness and asking citizens to register cell phone numbers and email addresses. On a tight budget, getting the attention of the public can be daunting.
In February, TFCC client San Diego County Office of Emergency Services, teamed up with Papa John's Pizza to encourage residents to sign up to receive emergency notifications on their cell phone with the county's AlertSanDiego system. As an incentive for residents to register their cell phones for emergency updates, Papa John's Pizza offered the first 500 new registrants a free medium, one-topping pizza. This attention-getting offer was picked up by the media and spread through the social media sphere by bloggers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers resulting in over 500 residents registering during the first few hours of the campaign. Over 1,200 people registered on the first day of the campaign and within two weeks San Diego had grown their database by 2,500 contacts. By the end of February more than 3,500 residents signed up with AlertSanDiego. As a result of February's popular campaign, Papa John's and the County Office of Emergency Services partnered again during the month of April. For more insight on San Diego's Papa John's public sign-up campaign, visit their blog.
After building your database, the next challenge is keeping the contact information accurate and up-to-date. This proves to be especially challenging for higher education clients, since students take time-off, transfer and graduate.
Middlesex County College (MCC) recently sent the following message out to students and staff:
This message contains information only. There is no emergency.
You are enrolled in the Middlesex County College Emergency Notification System (ENS). If you would like to remain in the system, you do not need to do anything. If you are no longer attending or employed at Middlesex County College, please email your name and the email address you used to sign up to RemoveENS@middlesexcc.edu and we will remove you from the system.
If you would like to edit any information in the system, please log on to CampusCruise and make the appropriate changes to your ENS account.
This message contains information only. There is no emergency.
Afterwords MCC saw the number of contacts in their database reduce by 8% resulting in a more accurate database. This same message can be modified and sent out to the general public.
What have you done to build awareness for your emergency notification system and your database? What worked and what didn't? How do you maintain your database? Please don't hesitate to share your suggestions and success stories.