The Challenge

The Town of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, needed a more efficient way to communicate with their citizens informing them of local activities that affect their day-to-day well-being. Outdated notification methods delayed responses and created disjointed communication between mature and young demographics resulting in frustrated citizens because they weren’t receiving relevant messages when it mattered most.

The Solution

Under Candace Mowbray, Director of Finance & Administration of Assiniboia, the town implemented Voyent Alert!, a mass notification system to streamline their communication challenges. Town administrators can now swiftly initiate alerts and notifications to a wide range of devices from phones, desktops, and other digital devices for improved response times so that citizens can remain engaged, informed, and safe.

Turning to Mass Notification

To close the communication gaps between mature and young generations within their community, Assiniboia consistently leverages Voyent Alert! for daily activities, including recreation programming, Water service disruptions, street maintenance, facility closures, and compost and waste disposal pick-ups.

Before implementing Voyent Alert!, the Town would mail flyers, add paper inserts to water bills or tax notices, and exclusively rely on citizens to check the town’s website, social media, or bulletin boards for the most up-to-date information.

These distribution practices proved to be time-consuming, expensive, and depending who was putting the information different methods were being used for communication. The Town recognized they needed a solution because they were not able to effectively inform their people and they never knew precisely how many people they were reaching.

Now, with Voyent Alert! The citizens are more aware of what’s going on a day-to-day basis and what actions they can take through multiple digital channels.

“It has made our jobs easier because it allows us to post in one unified place and spread information to anyone and everyone,” says Candace. “We can now track our impact as well through the Reports available to administration.”

Getting Up and Running

Moving fast and efficiently, the Town of Assiniboia on boarded multiple departments and public users onto the program in less than three weeks, which year-to –date is unprecedented. Picking up the program proved to be no problem for their team. “Visually, the platform is attractive and simple to navigate.” adds Candace. “We had great training with the support team, helping our team feel confident, as well it was reassuring to know that we had access to tutorials and resources on the website if we weren’t sure how to do something.  Overall the transition was smooth.”

The Future of Community Engagement

For any municipality, providing excellent communication to citizens is a top priority. Voyent Alert! helps communities achieve better outcomes by seamlessly reaching desired audiences on the channels they’re most likely to receive messages.

By eliminating the need to create separate notifications outside the platform, it reduces the time it takes to trigger a response and get info into the hands of people who need to take action.

“We enjoy being able to pick which groups we want to send memos to, on top of dispersing a message that goes to the wider community,” says Candace. The ability to add links and phone numbers in our alerts is also really convenient because it simplifies it for our recipients. Gone are the days of poor communication and a lack thereof. Our team was extremely excited to obtain the service Voyent Alert! provides and we 100% stand by the decision to use this platform!”

‘The public and the staff benefit from the information being provided, as well we actually increased frequency of communication due to the simplicity of using Voyent Alert!  Our message is distributed in a fraction of the time with way less effort than in the past!”