Leader Alert® - Health, Safety & Administrative Alerting Services

Leader Conference® is a Web 2.0 communications service that provides audio conferencing, web conferencing and alerting. It provides two levels of audio conferencing: (1) Leader Phone® is the first innovation in audio conferencing in almost 20 years. It is built on patented and patent pending innovations which give you more features and higher quality at less cost; (2) Leader Dialog® gives you basic Leader Phone® services in situations where you have no central budget and everyone pays their own charges. Leader Meeting™ web conferencing allows you to share presentations and documents online with Leader Phone®. Leader Alert® delivers mass voice, texting and email messages. Read more below or complete the Inquiry form below to request that a Leader Alert® consultant contact you for service and pricing information. Sample Alerts Application Human Voice Text-to- speech School Aviation safety Product recall Sports Get-out-the-vote What if you could replay the first minutes of the Virginia Tech tragedy? As a school administrator, what would you do differently? Chances are you would want a system in place – a system that would let you notify thousands of students, faculty and staff immediately. Although no one knows for sure, timely notices to VT students and faculty might have lessened or even prevented the loss of life. We owe it to the memories of those students and professors, as well as to our own constituents, to learn how to better cope with similar situations in the future, no matter whether the setting is education, government, commerce, industry, community or athletics. Large scale community-wide alerting is a new field. The task seems simple enough: broadcast a one-minute alert message to a hundred, thousand, or ten thousand people simultaneously. However, in the past we had to settle for generalized PA announcements, local news broadcasts, and word of mouth via endless phone calls. In this age of communications, such system are out-dated. Traditional alerting services have seen little investment in innovation until Leader® Web 2.0 inventions. Leader's designers and engineers took a fresh, throw-out-the-rules approach to re-thinking how voice, data and streaming media should support human collaboration. The results is a growing suite of applications that "talk" to each other seamlessly, without the need for expensive integration projects every time you want a new feature.

Alerting Notification     Pricing based upon requirements including Unlimited and Pay-per-alert plans (Submit Inquiry below to obtain more information & pricing)     Web 2.0 -based control console Phone handset controls (alert from your phone) Send any combination of alerts: Voice Text (SMS) Email Send pre-recorded voice alerts Send ad hoc voice alerts Send text-to-speech voice alerts Send up to 160-character text (SMS) alerts Send email alerts Launch alerts from your phone handset Manage group list options: Via your Leader Alertl® web account Upload from Outlook®, Excel®, Lotus Notes®, Access®, SQL, local contact directories, etc. Upload from SIS (student information system) API integration option (third party databases) Enter numbers at time of alert Escalations supported (call in this order until someone acknowledges receipt, then stop) Recipient authentication option (high security) Automatic retries for busy and unanswered numbers Records to recipient's voice mail Reports / call history / delivery status available online Reports / call history downloadable into Excel® Opt-in community portal (allows constituents to manage securely their own contact numbers, including wireless & unpublished) GIS map API option High security web console (128-bit SSL encryption) Click-thru support from school websites Alert urgency options (low, medium, high priority) System redundancies for fault tolerance Large-scale supported International alerts supported VoIP and wireless supported Customize your alert Caller ID number 24x7x365 technical assistance Ohio School Boards Association endorsed         Leader Alert® health, safety and administrative alerting can be provisioned for you within minutes. Pricing plans vary depending upon service requirements. A Leader Alert® consultant will contact you to: (1) understand your requirements, (2) insure that Leader Alert® services align with your needs, and (3) propose the optimal pricing plan for your consideration. (All inquiries are confidential. We do not share customer informaton with third parties.) First Name Last Name Organization Telephone Email Address Confirm Email Address Number of Recipients Comments/Questions reload image Enter code*: or, email your inquiry to: leaderalert@leader.com Powered by Digital Leaderboard® - the platform the State of Louisiana counted on for Hurricane Katrina life-saving when all other systems had failed.

Leader Phone® is our full-featured audio conferencing service. Leader Dialog® gives you another billing option for audio conferencing in situations where you have no budget and you need everyone to pay their own call costs, for example, for community, education, church, homeland security and political events. Leader Meeting™ web conferencing then allows you to present slides and documents online, which is the next best thing to being in the same room. Finally, Leader Alert® alert notification extends your communications reach dramatically by enabling you to broadcast voice, texting and email notices to 10's, 100's, 1000's or 10,000's from the same powerful Digital Leaderboard® Web 2.0 platform.

Ten years ago, we pledged to take the provisioning of voice and data services to the users, so that they could use the services without having to rely on intermediaries.

We introduced our first iteration of Leader Alert® to a gathering of 700 Homeland Security officials in Las Vegas at a terror threat simulation in 2004. We expanded our audio conferencing, news and alerting capabilities to support the Governor of Louisiana in her Hurricane Katrina disaster response. We later acquired an early-innovator school system in the Parma School System in suburban Cleveland, which has become one of the more experienced users of school alerting in the country. They have used alerting for a range of situations: predators, weapons, fire and generator-outages, weather closures, late buses from a field trip and get-out-the-vote reminders.

Alerting Lessons Learned

Here are some of the lessons learned to date about large-scale public alerting from our experiences supporting such customers as the State of Louisiana's Hurricane Katrina disaster response and school districts like the Parma City School District in suburban Cleveland.

1. Keep it simple. People are nervous and on edge during a crisis. System that are complex or complicated tend to get put aside in favor of tools that are simple and straightforward. We designed simplicity into every aspect of Leader Alert®. Few features take more than a few steps to execute.

2. Practice first. Too many emergency systems are implemented with fanfare and then go unused. Alerting services are like anything else, practice makes perfect. Use Leader Alert® for non-emergencies (e.g., administrative announcements, schedule changes, routine notices) so that you are familiar with it during an emergency. In a crisis, people use and depend upon that with which they are familiar.

3. Embrace mistakes. Mistakes happen. Embrace them, don't crucify the person making the mistake when they are sending alerts. If you do that will guarantee that your alerting system will not be able to be relied upon in an emergency because the operators will hesitate to use it for fear of more ridicule if they mess up.

4. Under a minute. Keep your alert messages short and to-the-point. If they ramble, or contain too much detail, your recipients may hang up and miss vital information, or worse yet, will ignore future messages.

5. Leadership. Those who depend upon you want to know versus guess when it involves their safety. They appreciate timely alerts from their leaders. Proactive alerts show care and concern as well as a decisiveness in those who lead.

6. Reassure. Alerting is often a lifeline in a crisis. In some emergency events, like Hurricane Katrina, regular communications fails. Surprisingly it is often possible to starburst alerts into an affected region even when the people in that region cannot contact each other. Such was our experience in Louisiana during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Without accurate information, victims of emergency events have few choices about how to react. They can get in their cars and drive downtown to try and get information, thus clogging the roads and preventing access by first responders. They can try call the offices of various authorities whose phone systems will inevitably ring busy. They can watch TV, hoping for some news. Timely, informative, accurate alerts trump all the options previously available.

7. Good enough. “The perfect is the enemy of the good” (Voltaire). Temper the instinct to overly rehearse alerts when in crisis mode in order not to stumble over words. There is no perfect alert. Likewise, some administrators may be so fearful of making a mistake that they fail to alert when they should. Management author Tom Peter’s book  In Search of Excellence recommends: “Ready. Fire. Aim.” as an essential philosophy in implementing change.

8. Delegate well. Make the alerting approval process fast and effective. Too many rules (such as “consult an attorney first”) and hesitant decision-making will ensure that the process will stall, and important alerts will not be sent. Manage this process with decisive, action-oriented persons for whom words come easily. A radio voice is nice, but optional!

			"Leader Alert is so much easier than having to retype everything and send them out through two separate systems.  Now all you have to do is click, click, click and you're done!  This makes everything easier." "We can now contact everyone in 2 to 3 minutes where it used to take us one and a half hours!  This makes everything easier." Frank Bowen Sergeant Columbus Regional Airport Authority
			"I really appreciate Leader's support and responsiveness to us immediately after the storm when we needed a communications solution quickly, and you all delivered." (Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke) Andy Kopplin Chief of Staff to the Governor of Lousiana (during Hurricane Katrina immediate aftermath) Executive Director, Louisiana Recovery Authority (Hurricane Katrina recovery)
			“We have used Leader Alert for events from emergency situations to our buses returning four hours late from a Washington D.C. trip. The bottom line is that parents want accurate information as soon as possible. On August 31, 2007 we alerted 7,000 parents in less than 30 minutes to a child predator who was using a puppy to lure children into alleys.“ Ron Durkin Director of Safety and Security, Parma City Schools [Following an alert to parents about disarming a knife-wielding women trying to enter the school building.] “The ability to notify parents so quickly really helped us control rumors and prevent panic. We were able to get to parents and let them know what had happened before false information spread and/or they heard about the incident from other sources.” Principal Frank Spizak Greenbriar Middle School Parma, Ohio
			“I am really glad that K-State decided to implement this program. It was long overdue. Thanks to who ever decided to start this.” Kansas State University Student
			"Less than a half a minute after we launched our first Leader Alert to our 5,338 students, faculty and staff, the voice alerts started arriving. 91.5% arrived successfully within 7 minutes. This is a high completion rate in a satisfactory time frame. Considering busy signals and wireless disconnects where Leader Alert retries after fifteen minutes, we are very pleased that all 5,338 voice alerts arrived within 17.5 minutes. Leader has indicated they want to improve even on these results. We are pleased with this first test." Kent Steward Coordinator Fort Hayes State University Crisis Management Team

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Leader Alert ® Web 2.0 Control Console
The Leader Alert® console has been designed "in the crucible of battle" from inception. Each and every feature and function responds to specific real world requests from first responders in a variety of settings from homeland security terrorist threats to Hurricane Katrina to school predators. An overriding design criteria is simplicity. In the midst of crisis is not the time to be having to remember how something works. The tools that are relied upon in a crisis are simple, familiar and straightforward. Leader Alert® is designed to enable you to rely on it when the chips are down, or you must get out important messages to those who need the information.

• Leader Phone® sales info (pdf) | Leader Phone® Customer Select™ sales info (pdf)
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• Leader Meeting™ sales info (pdf)
• Leader Alert® sales info (pdf)
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