As the Mayor of White Salmon, Marla Keethler has always been committed to ensuring that her community has effective and reliable ways of communicating, especially in times of emergency. As she became mayor in 2020, the city lost their local newspaper which started to show the cracks in the communication systems. For example, when the largest natural gas outage in the Pacific Northwest occurred at the end of her first year, the website and social media were not enough to keep residents informed during this emergency. Marla and her team knew that they needed to find a more robust solution.
“It ended up being the largest natural gas outage in the north west. Through that week during winter weather… it became very clear that we would need another way to immediately get information into people’s hands. That outage made it clear to us how many of our older residents were out of the loop who weren’t seeing our posts on our website or Facebook.”
They needed a communication system that would sit alongside national and statewide emergency alert systems to provide local updates. For example, the Bingen-White Salmon Police Department could have recruited the community to assist them when a person with Alzheimers went missing earlier in 2021.
In early 2021, Marla and her team started exploring notification systems in the market with an emphasis on an easy-to-use user interface. As a small city of only 2500 residents, White Salmon lacked the resources and full time staff to launch the initiative and therefore needed a tool multiple members could access easily and operate without significant training.
“We’re a small city government so we don’t have the bandwidth on our team… we wanted something that can work out of the box and was very intuitive and user friendly.”
The team explored solutions from Granicus, CodeRed and Smart 911 but when White Salmon came across Voyent Alert, it checked all the boxes and more. It’s designed from the ground up for smaller municipalities with an intuitive user interface, attractive fixed pricing and an extensive feature set. Not only can Voyent Alert send emails, texts, voice and app notifications but those alerts can include rich content like maps and attachments.
“We wanted more flexibility to include more detail than just a character limited sentence.”
During severe winter weather, Marla and the team send the alert with an attachment guiding citizens directly to warming shelters. They can easily attach the snow plow map and trash schedule. Notifications can also be targeted based on location. For example, during a wildfire, White Salmon can include a map and have different notifications based on the person’s location.
“Knowing that we could get the different boundaries and sections quickly activated through Voyent was something appealing for wildfire threats.”
In addition to emergencies and reminders, White Salmon uses Voyent Alert to engage and get feedback from its residents. They use Voyent Alert’s quick surveying tool to get quick input from residents.
“[We were] intrigued when we saw the ability it had to do a variety of alerts, not just emergency situations. This could fill that void we lost from our local newspaper closing. Like sending notifications on council meetings and the ability to have better engagement with our residents through small polls for certain types of information when we want to get feedback.”
When American Rescue Plan Act (“ARPA”) funds became available during the pandemic, they used Voyent to poll the community on how best to allocate the funds. Now, they’ll poll residents for local issues like putting up a new stop sign and get 75-100 responses, which has become an invaluable resource for council meetings.
Marla is excited to continue using Voyent Alert to improve communication and emergency preparedness in White Salmon. Already, 400 of the 2,500 residents have signed up but she plans to expand the number of registrants. She is confident that the platform will be an invaluable resource for her community for years to come.
