Team Rubicon Uses Everbridge to Coordinate Volunteer Response to Humanitarian Disaster

Glendale, Calif. – Jan. 22, 2014 – Team Rubicon, a disaster relief organization comprised of military veterans and first responders, uses Everbridge, the leading provider of critical communication solutions, to accelerate response to humanitarian disasters. Team Rubicon is dedicated to arriving first during humanitarian disasters, assisting communities worldwide with search and rescue, medical care, debris removal, command and control support with other agencies, logistical assistance, and home repair. Everbridge allows Team Rubicon to send targeted requests to volunteers based on location and area of expertise, track responses, and quickly kick off relief efforts.

Prior to implementing Everbridge, Team Rubicon contacted volunteers one by one, through manual calling and emailing – a time-intensive and laborious process. The Everbridge solution allows Team Rubicon to quickly reach large numbers of volunteers, capture responses through polling, and send deployment details to available team members.

In November, Team Rubicon launched Operation: Honest Abe to assist roughly 400 homeowners impacted by tornadoes in the Midwest. Team Rubicon used Everbridge to alert volunteers within a 250-mile radius of affected areas. More than 100 volunteers responded to the messages, sent through email and SMS. To date, these volunteers have given more than 7,000 hours of service in response to the crisis, removing debris, trimming damaged trees, fixing up salvaged homes, and demolishing those homes that are beyond repair.

Recently, Team Rubicon also used Everbridge for an unconventional use. “When we deployed our volunteers to the Philippines to respond to Super Typhoon Haiyan, we had their friends and families loaded into Everbridge. We were able to keep them up to date with what their loved ones were up to – when they landed, or when they moved to a different location. It was really comforting; I was actually the one sending out those messages,” said Sean Horgan, regional administrator for Team Rubicon Region 1. “I remember when they first got there, I got the notification at around 4 o’clock in the morning. I had the message to friends and family pretty much ready to go – using the Everbridge Mobile Manager app, I was able to just roll over in bed, hit send, and it just went out. I was able to check its progress on the walk to the subway in an hour and see who got it, who responded to it, and who we may need to follow up with later on in the day.”

In 2013, Team Rubicon doubled in size to nearly 14,000 volunteers and responded to 19 major disasters, including tornadoes in Oklahoma and Illinois, flooding in Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, and its biggest international operation to date, Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. To learn more about Team Rubicon’s mission, click here.

Related Resources

Case Study: Team Rubicon

Video: Everbridge Enhances Team Rubicon’s Operational Capacity

About Team Rubicon

Team Rubicon (TR) unites the skills and experience of military veterans with first responders to rapidly deploy emergency response teams. TR offers veterans a chance to continue their service by helping and empowering those afflicted by disasters, and also themselves. For more about Team Rubicon, visit www.teamrubiconusa.org.

About Everbridge

Everbridge provides critical communication solutions to more than 30 million end users in all major industries and government sectors around the globe. The Everbridge solutions suite allows clients to manage emergencies, mass notifications, incident communications, and situational intelligence from a single system. Ultimately, these solutions help clients save lives, manage critical activities and improve the efficiency of daily operations. For more information about Everbridge, please see www.everbridge.com.