That's going to be pitching it to in the long term and get them in, very early. I think you want to really emphasize incorporating your hazard and risk assessments. So, for instance, your Hazard Vulnerability Assessments, physical risk assessments, Business Impact Analysis, all this stuff is really, really helpful to justify, A, making large purchases. You know, if you're trying to purchase something, you know, like a new EOC and you haven't sort of done the groundwork to show what problem does this solve, how is this making my job easier, are there hazards specifically on campus that this addresses or needs that we've identified in previous assessments, then you're not going to get very far. You're kind of spin your tires. I foot-stomp this. Anyone who's listened to any of my other talks, everything starts with an assessment. If you're writing your emergency operations plans, if you're starting a program from scratch, which is what I did, I was the first full-time emergency manager at the University of Vermont, you know, you have to basically build some sort of foundation to begin with. When you're talking strategic investment, that is even more important because what you're going to be doing is making a business case for how you're going to be doing business for the next three-five years, depending on, you know, what you're purchasing, what the contracting process is. I mean, if you're building a new EOC, that could be in the next, you know, it could be decades before you get another one. So really leaning into the data and the evidence that you have, to support your justification. The other thing you might want to do is go through some scenario planning. Look at all the options that you may run into when you're asking for this funding. So if you're asking for, you know, a mass notification system, you know, what are the questions going to come up? Like, how is this going to be used? What is the value, on campus? How is this going to make our students safer? How does this make our business operations more efficient? The more sort of forecasting and creative thought that you can put into this, the more likely you're not going to get caught by surprise, when you go to make the pitch to leadership to make this investment. And you can game this out in a number. Yes. Yes, yes. I do have one question. Yes. As far as how do you balance between, you know, going the positive approach versus because we know that when there's something bad happens and you're not prepared, it's, you know, things can go really south really quickly. Yes. You know, how do you balance the positive versus the fear-mongering, you know? I mean, and how do you find that balance? Yeah. So I, one of my biggest recommendations with anytime you're looking at, like, a large system purchase or a big change in how you're going to operate, try to do that before you even get to the point where you're like, "I need to ask for money." Like, just come up with all the scenarios that you can. Build a wish list. You know, keep it, you know, have your vision board on your wall of all the stuff you want to do. When something bad happens and you've already sort of planted the seed and you have the data already there to support your effort, you can jump on it like that. For instance, you know, let's say you're advocating for a large EOC and, you know, you're working out of a closet, which many of us do and have, and, you know, that's an investment that is hard to justify sometimes when, you know, leadership sees you as a nice-to-have or something that, you know, hopefully they never see Zach show up. I literally was told many times that when I showed up, people go, "Oh, no. What happened?" So when you're starting to build that vision board of what you want to accomplish in the future, if something bad happens and you start to see the evidence, you know, good after-action report, for instance, and you could show, "Hey, that incident, we did not have enough space in our EOC to bring in all the stakeholders. You know, the city couldn't be there. PD couldn't be there. It was a mess. And we didn't have the systems that we needed. You know, I couldn't send out the notification quick enough because we had bad data in there or whatever. We overwhelmed the system." Because I already knew I wanted that, and I'd already done the research where it should go, you know, who needs to be involved, I just pluck that off the board and I go up to my boss and I say, "Hey, remember we talked about this a while ago? Here it is." And the reason I recommend doing that is not just for the, "Oh, no. Knee-jerk reaction. We need this." It's also grants, right? So sometimes you have to build that stuff ahead of time knowing that there's going to be a grant cycle that's going to come up again or a big budget cycle or whatever. You have some change in leadership at the campus. You find yourself in a new department or something where you have more opportunity. And so if you have that stuff already done, you're golden. But if you have to come up with it on the fly, you're toast. You're never going to get it done because it just takes so long to sort of build that picture. Plus, anyone who's done any procurement at a university or college knows it is, you know, molasses running uphill in January. It just is such a slow process. You know, there's a lot of bureaucracy. And again, if you depending on how you report to your bosses, you know, I've heard of emergency managers reporting to the custodial services. You know, like, who recognizes your value and the value of what you're making the purchase for impacts a lot of what is going to happen. So again, bring the stakeholders in early. Have those hazard assessments, risk assessments, your after-actions, anything where you're building your evidence in very early because then you don't have to justify it throughout it. You've got the data right there. And you know, again, we're largely dealing with doctors, PhDs. You know, they love data. That's why they got into higher education. It's all data. So the more data you have and the more, you know, the better business case you can present, the better you will, you know, have outcome for actually getting that stuff bought. So it's a great question. I like to think of it. I always was constantly adding to a list. I literally had this huge. It was actually OneNote because I'm a tech geek and I wanted to keep it all saved in one spot. But anytime I was like, "Man, I wish I had, you know, this radio," or, "I wish I had this piece of software," or, "I wish I had an additional person," I would put it there. And then if I had downtime, which we're, you know, we're getting into the graduation season, so we're all doing our graduation planning and stuff, in the summer when people generally left me alone, that's when I started to go back and do that analysis and say, "All right. What do I desperately need? What would be nice to have? And then what's my, like, dream sheet of, like, this would just be cool?" In that, you also need to remember this is another thing I foot-stomp. So again, I'm going to foot-stomp. Hazard risk assessments always, always, always start with the foundation. The other thing that anyone who's listened to me talk before is learn how to communicate, and that means to a lot of different audiences because you're going to be making a pitch to a lot of different types of people. You're going to be making a pitch to students because it's their, you know, tuition dollars, potentially, that are going to fund whatever you're purchasing. You might be making a pitch to a government agency, you know, whoever sort of oversees grant funding. And you're going to be making a pitch to your leadership and, and the university's leadership. Each of those is a different approach. You know, one's going to be very formal. The other is going to be very sort of like tugging at the heartstrings. Making the pitch to parents, right? And that what's the first thing that, you know, people think of when they walk on a campus, during their freshman tours? Is this campus feel safe? You know, is it safe? What investments have they made? And largely, it's not emergency managers. It's usually, you know, the cops and blue lights, the stuff that they can tangibly see, which makes it really hard for us because often we're behind several closed doors. And a lot of the stuff that we do is planning and preparedness stuff. So get really good at communicating who you are, what you do, and why people need to listen to you. So that needs to start early, and you should be doing that constantly. Any opportunity you get to get in front of leadership or your students, any of that stuff, just go out there and do it. And then finally, for sort of like the start of the strategic investments, you want to think about what is it that you're trying to solve? Are you trying to make your, you know, a practice more efficient? Or are you trying to solve a huge capability gap that you have? Or again, it's okay to say, "I just think it would be nice to have this. It would make my job easier." It may not be something that is necessarily, like, super tangible to everybody else, but it will have a huge impact on how you function. Like, a nice office. Like, I know that sounds crazy, but if you have to work somewhere, you know, getting called in 24/7, I was in the office of one, which meant they called me all the time. I said, "I need a nice office. I need a lot of space to work. I need to be able to hold meetings in there." And I made the pitch, and they built me an office, which is never just doesn't happen at the campus. They're like, "You can find one free hole, and, you know, if somebody retires or leaves, try to jump on it." But I got really good at making those pitches. And again, I had it on my wish list. And the minute the opportunity came up, it came out. So that's the start. Now, how do you do this cost-effectively? Because again, it's always going to come down to dollars and cents. No matter how, I guess, altruistic you think you are, leadership still has to balance a budget. And they have to stretch those budgets potentially a lot, you know? And again, we're not necessarily the most visible or tangible asset that is on a campus. If it's me asking for something, you know, like an EOC or something that's going to be sort of out of the view of most of the campus, if that's competing against something like a police car or, you know, whatever, a new building, you know, we're competing a lot now with just amenities and all the stuff that campuses are doing to make, you know, campus life more enjoyable and pleasurable, that you have to figure out very quickly. How do I take my small piece of the bucket and grow it so that I can make strategic investments and not just tactical just-in-time investments? The way that I like to do this is first, what we did on our campus is we brought everyone on campus that is responsible for making purchases together once a month, once every two months. We all talked it out. We would say, "Hey, you know, I'm in the need for a mass notification system. Is anyone else on campus using this?" Almost every single time, someone's like, "Oh, yeah. We made a purchase for this for, you know, some, you know, whatever reason a while ago. We're only using, like, 25% of what its capability is." If you want to jump in on this, like, that'd be great. You can help fund it. And instead of trying to start from scratch and having to come up with all of that purchasing process, all the procurement process, RFPs, everything else, you can lean on your fellow campus agency that's probably already bought it or at least initiated that process. The other thing that we did is say, "All right. I'm looking for this tool. How could it help you?" Because now you can become an advocate and evangelize my needs as well. And so if I'm looking for a system that's really expensive, so let's say it's an EOC, I might bring in our IT folks and say, "Hey, you know, you guys are working all over the campus in, in small pockets. But when there's an IT incident that's really significant, you don't have a spot to come together and work." So this could also be your emergency operations center. You know, this could be your coordination point. You could also reach out to your local community. University of Vermont was the, the big fish in our area. You know, we are the, the largest, daytime population on campus, makes us one of the largest towns in the state. And so we try to help out our local community as much as we can. And so we would go out and say, "Hey, City of Burlington, you're like, we're looking at this. Is this something you might be interested in? Or could you benefit from this? Or could we maybe strategically invest in it so that it's not all on us to buy it?" And we did that with a lot of stuff, access control. We ran access control for other campuses, other universities, as well as city assets within the town. And we just basically held the main contract and then licensed it out as a subscription. You know what, Zach? One thing sometimes a lot of times happens is, okay, maybe one part of the campus has bought one system, but then another part of the campus has bought a different system, and then another part of the campus has bought a different type of a system. How do you integrate those things so that or decide which system, you know, is takes precedence? Oh, yeah. That, so that was actually the lead-in for the campus purchasing group. It was software mostly. Like, we realized, for instance, we were all buying Adobe licenses. We had, like, so many Adobe licenses on this campus. We looked at each other, and we're like, "How much does it cost for an enterprise license?" It was thousands of dollars less than we were paying per month to have everyone buying, you know, all these individual licenses. We found that across the board in everything. So we would come together. Again, this was a fairly informal thing. We just had a business analyst that worked for the finance and admin department who was like, "I'm sick and tired of doing the end-of-month, you know, reconciliation and being like, 'Why is this person paying for something that we already have over here?'" So she reached out to a bunch of this Kristin Winer. I'm going to give her a shout-out because she did an awesome job with this. And she just started pinging everyone around the campus that was sort of in her position. And we got together, and we started saying, like, "Hey, we're making this investment in this. You know, I want to buy this piece of software. You know, is could you use this somehow?" and then we would decide, like, "Okay. You know, you're going to use it for this amount. So maybe you pitch in that amount, you know, to help out." And so, you know, I'm responsible for 50% because I'm the majority user. You're responsible for 25% because you're using, you know, again, I'll use mass notification. Obviously, Everbridge is a sponsor here, you know, so you're going to use it for your internal notifications, which you need for all sorts of different things. We had it hooked up to alarm systems. We used it for weather notifications, all sorts of different uses. So then we just start bringing those stakeholders together to help justify that investment. And again, if you go beyond the campus, now you're building a rapport with the community, and you're showing that you're a good community member yourself as a university or a college, that, you know, it's not just, you know, students taking over your town, you know, for a certain number of months per year, but you are a huge value to that community. And again, as I was a single emergency manager, there's very few professional emergency managers in our state. We don't have county emergency management agencies. So I became a really supportive emergency manager for the city and the other local campuses. We're like, "Hey, we could actually share resources." I know Doug Babcock is logged in here. He was the emergency manager for Saint Michael's. And Bruce Bovat was the emergency manager or security director for Champlain College across the street. We started sharing EOC spaces. We made sure all our notification systems were connected. It starts to build this, like, irreplaceable system. So when it does come time to start chopping budgets, you show, like, "I'm you cannot cut anything for me. Like, we are invaluable to this campus." So, Well, it makes your systems way more ineffective too, you know, especially when you're talking about a mass notification, my goodness, then you're not just sending it to the campus. You're sending it to the whole community. Right. There's nothing proprietary about public safety. You really want everyone to be, you know, sharing that event. And especially when you're talking about, you know, Clery Act and some other, you know, requirements that warrant this, you know, the more breadth you have in your notification, the more effective your program is going to be. So, yeah, it was definitely something, it's a balancing act, but, you know, we always try to bring in everyone and start that discussion and figure out who it is. That also includes students because they can become your strongest advocates. They can also become really challenging if they don't understand the system. I hated the blue lights. I don't. It just, I hate them so much. I just found them really ineffective. They cost a huge amount of my budget annually to maintain them. And I was like, "We can move to other stuff." And people were like, "There's absolutely no way we're getting rid of them. Like, it's just not going to happen. It's dead in the water. Don't ask for it." And then we brought in students. And students were like, "The bad stuff that happens to us actually really isn't out there. It's usually in the dorms. And we don't have blue lights in the dorms. And we took the phones away years ago. There's no, you know, old standard phones." So they were like, "We could really use a piece of software where we could, you know, hit essentially a blue light on our phone from our rooms. That would actually solve a huge problem." Now, all of a sudden, the wheels are turning, and people are like, "Oh, okay. Those blue lights, which are great for campus tours, you know, aren't necessarily the solution. The students aren't actually thinking that that's what they're going to go to in an emergency. They're trying to think of how does it affect me? So having them involved really early, I think, is also really important. They can, you know, they're going to rock the boat more than you're able to. So, you know, getting them on your side and explaining why you want to, you know, spend their tuition dollars potentially on this is really important. In addition, grants and funding opportunities outside of your normal budgeting process are always an option. Grants can be really hard because colleges sometimes are in this quasi-government, quasi-private sector. University of Vermont is the university of the state, but it's not a government agency. So a lot of times, I was sort of stuck where I couldn't use grants because we weren't really considered a public entity in the same way that a lot of places did. And I had to do some creative stuff. I figured out the Nonprofit Security Grant worked, and I was able to buy some cool stuff with that. But if you are a part of the state, a lot of times, there's purchase agreements and other stuff that you may not be aware of that you can go out and utilize when you're making those buys. So, for instance, with, you know, radios, you might have an exclusive contract with L3Harris or Motorola or whatever. Go to the state, figure out, "Hey, I need to buy new radios. What's the best price you can get me?" And if they can't do that, then you can go out you can skip the RFP a lot of times by doing that. So, you know, get creative with this. The other time is shake the tree. Every once in a while, like, we found out we had to rebuild our entire dispatch, and we're like, "There's no budget for this." And then we went back and looked at a capital fund that had been building for years that no one was tracking. And there was, like, $500,000 sitting in there that people had forgotten about. That's, you know I can only imagine how this is done on the really big campuses. But, you know, this this had been filling for years. And they're like, "Hey, we found some money that we didn't think was there. Now, I'm only asking for, like, $200,000 to build out this brand new dispatch and radio system on the campus versus $750,000, which was dead in the water based on that budget year." Anytime you're making a strategic investment, always understand the full cost, implementation and integration. Every, you know, person that you talk to, they're going to say, "Yes, this is the cost of our software, our hardware. You know, we'll come out, maybe do initial training or something along those lines." Does it come with any sort of warranty? Does it come with any sort of support? You know, some of the more expensive systems, you have to buy the support package to get any help. And how do you integrate it with stuff you already had on your campus? So, like you were asking earlier, we had a Four Winds display system, which runs all the electronic displays on the campus. And, you know, one thing I wanted to do was make sure that we were trying to hit our mass notification system on every single point that I could. And visual aid, you know, on a display system is huge. That helps reach, you know, people who may be hard of hearing or, you know, the attention just of an entire campus of screens going to an emergency is really effective. And so I started figuring that out. I was like, "Hey, you know, how much is this going to cost?" It turns out that the person that had paid for the Four Winds system was like, "Actually, we have, it's built into our contract that they can support us integrating some APIs." They did it for free, basically. Then we had a huge new campus system that we didn't have otherwise. Also think about what happens when you leave. If nobody else knows how to use the system or maintain the system, you know, yes, we're all. I think anyone in higher education, especially emergency management, like, I'm committed to it, right? But if you win the lottery tomorrow, you're probably not coming into work. So how do you sustain that system after you leave? So training people. Does the system work for everyone else that's in your team? Most of my EOC team were people from other departments on campus who had nothing to do with emergency management or public safety. So I had to train all of them to do this continuously. Like, we did remedial training every single month at our monthly meetings to just make sure, "Okay, do you know how to log into the mass notification system? Do you know how to log into our incident management system?" And we just go through all this stuff. And I wanted to make sure that if I left or, you know, got hit by a bus or whatever, that it wouldn't immediately disappear. Like, someone was there to keep it going in the long term. Because the other thing is, sometimes when you make these purchases, your IT department might sign off on it, but they're not going to know how it works. They're not going to be able to necessarily support you in the way that you think they are. So having them involved, talking through that process early to say, "This is great. It's a great system. But what if?" really important. And then long-term funding. So if you get a just-in-time, you know, budget allotment to buy a $50,000 system, and it costs $20,000 per year after that, you know, how far out can you forecast that you're going to be able to afford this system? And what happens if you need to upgrade? What happens if the company goes out, whatever reason? You know, just trying to make those again, be very strategic and long-term planning with this. And then the worst thing is, like, RFP, single source. Like, what is the you know, how do you even go through this process? You, when you're making those decisions and you're putting out these proposals, just making sure that you're thinking, "Okay, any whatever I'm asking for, I need to be very clear in what I'm trying to sustain for the next 10 years or five years, whatever that time is. And I need to make sure that as I'm going through this process, that I try to build it so that it's easy to get back." So if you're doing an RFP, you don't want in five years to find out you have to go through this entire process again. You know, you want to try to cement whatever works really, really well in there for as long as you can so that you don't have to change systems constantly. And I know that can be challenging. It depends on your, you know, university's policies, your state's policies, but. So finally, building the case. Like, this is where again, I'll foot-stomp it constantly. You have to get really, really good at communicating your value and why you do the things that you do and why you need the stuff that you need. And so getting all the stakeholders involved that are going to potentially be impacted by the system, or using the system is critical. And so that means, you know, representatives from every part of your campus, your staff, your students, your professors, your leadership and administration, you know, even visitors, like, ping them and say, like, "Hey, you were here for the hockey game. How did you feel about, you know, did you feel like you had all the information you needed in the event of an emergency here?" And just get that feedback and get them involved and learn what it is that they need. And that means also staying tapped into the campus and learning, you know, what are the things that students are concerned by. If you are, you know, paying attention to the student newspaper, to social media, you'll start to recognize, like, here are the things that are scaring kids. Here are the things that are, like, making parents question whether or not the campus is, you know, safe. And all of that, again, as you're collecting your evidence, you're building that case, that's going to help you dramatically when you get to the point of, "Hey, leadership, I need this." And they'll go, "Well, sure. But I have to do this as well." And you go, "Well, all the students are saying this has to be done. And parents are saying they're not going to send their kids here next year if you don't do it." So I try to always think of that in that entire sort of loop, as I'm starting to, like, now get to the point of, like, asking for the funding. Like, do you get your information, like, by like doing climate surveys or just pinging and getting anecdotal examples, things like that? How do you what does that look like? We had a very, very, very good relationship with the dean of students. And, you know, our recruitment team and everything else. Like, I was always involved with them. So they were always obviously more concerned about the sort of overall campus, you know, climate. But they would give me an opportunity to put in a couple questions every year for public safety stuff. And they were very aware of things that were impacting the campus that they would bring to me and say, "Hey, just so you know, like, there's a lot of concerns about, you know, X. And, you know, this is going to become a problem in the next couple years because, you know, it's something that has been ignored for a long you know, it's usually, like, infrastructure, right? Like, what's the hardest thing that we always do? It's like maintenance and infrastructure investments are so challenging. So, again, as you're collecting your data, you're doing your analysis, collect everything. Like, and I'm not even joking. Like, go on social media and, you know, do hashtag your university or college and see what people are saying and pull that stuff out because it is relevant. And, you know, we tend to plan. Well, not tend to. We plan with our own lens, right? We have our view of what it is that we're doing. But, like, when you're talking about the DEI of preparedness, like, trying to make sure that you have an inclusive, equitable safety program on your campus, I'm not going to have the perspectives of every student or staff or faculty member on the campus. I need to make sure that I'm bringing in as many perspectives as I can because I'm going to be looking through it through my lens. If my lens doesn't line up with everyone, then I might make a huge investment in something that, when it's actually implemented, nobody's going to care about, nobody's going to use. Or it could be, you know, even worse than that and just be an embarrassment to the university. So you just you don't want to, like, make decisions in a vacuum, I guess is what I'm saying. The other way to do that is to get leadership involved in training and exercising, get students involved in training and exercising. So when you're running through your exercises and you're saying, like, "Hey, we're talking about, you know, what would happen if there was a wildfire right off campus?" You know, bring them in and show, "Hey, this is why we want a giant voice system outside, right? Because we went through this exercise and we learned that if this building burns down, all the campus network goes down. You know, it's attached to a cell tower. The cell tower goes down. And now we don't have the ability to warn people." We learned, through an exercise one time, that there were two buildings on campus where, if they got destroyed, 911 services went down for the like, I think it was half the county right there. And the system that it was relying on to get parts, you had to go to eBay. So it was discovered through the exercise. What it did was it pushed our telecom folks to get some information. Now they, you know, they're trying to justify switching the entire campus to voice over IP. They can now use this for their case as well. So, you know, it was a win-win for us. We had a more robust communication system. We reduced or mitigated the hazard of losing 911. So, I also like to, you know, figure out how flexible can we keep the system, right? Like, how's it, what is going to be affecting me in five years? What's going to be affecting me in 10 years? You know, try to forecast that so that, again, as you're building the case for your purchase, you can say, "All right, right now, it's nice to have. But in two years, it's going to be critical. And in 10 years, if you don't have this, you know, you're an idiot." And it might even be like, "Hey, we're trying to lead the charge, right? Like, this is a new technology that we're trying to innovate with. We're a university. We should be innovating. We should be, like, investing in new technologies. You know, let's try to do that." And that, you know, again, like I said, partner with your other agencies and organizations in the area, you know, so that you're getting all those different perspectives. You can figure out how's this going to work in the big picture, you know? Don't just think about campus, right? Like, when a disaster happens, it's not just campus. It's the county. It's the state. It's the region. So how does your stuff fit into that big picture, you know? And maybe what does it do to support the overall, you know, efforts? And then finally, you know, you have to distill this all down to something that leadership needs to know. And it's not your boss. It's probably your boss's boss. And maybe your boss's boss's boss. So how do you get all of this into that elevator pitch? Because you're probably only going to have, you know, one slide in a budget hearing. So do the pitch to as many different people as possible and say, "Hey, what do you think of this? You know, would you buy this?" And see how they react. And, you know, in many cases, you're going to learn that you have no idea what you're talking about. Their perspective will actually help build you into a much better message that you know resonates with the president or resonates with, you know, your director. Just lots of really, really cool stuff that, you know, you're going to get from involving lots of people and trying to just see every angle that you possibly can as you're doing this. I think that is my last slide. I'm going to drink some water now because I'm losing my voice, as you all can hear. Great job. Now we're going to turn it over to Courtney. Hi, everyone. I'm Courtney. I'm honored and thrilled to be here today to talk to you guys about the ROI Calculator. This is a tool that Everbridge offers. You all are free to use it. Before I hand you the link, I'd love to walk you through kind of what it is and what it does. So on the, oh, I've got slide control. Forrester is an analyst relations firm. You may have heard of it. Industry analysts, essentially, are independent market research employees who talk about the market. We were able to commission from them a Total Economic Impact study or a TEI study in which they evaluated Everbridge and then calculated the return on investment of purchasing Everbridge. As Zach was saying, we offer products that are relevant to campuses. It may be relevant for you. So the TEI study, before I get into the calculator, I just want to talk about the study as a whole. And again, this is something generic that you can use to build your business case on how Everbridge impacts organizations. And then coupled with the ROI Calculator, which is like a customized, algorithm output for you and for your organization with your real numbers, can tell a really powerful story. So in order to create the Total Economic Impact calculator, or sorry, study, Forrester interviewed four organizations who use Everbridge. And from these four organizations, they were able to create a composite organization and then apply their mathematical, calculations that none of us get to know because it's the Forrester secret sauce onto this made-up composite organization to kind of create the general return on investment that Everbridge has. They found a 358% return on investment, in a payback period of less than six months. So really, really exciting. So if you're putting in, you know, X, you're getting 358x back. And the net present value is $6.62 million, which is really exciting. So here in the slides, which will be sent out to you, I have linked to the original study, which is many pages that basically says what I just said in more words. The infographic, which is kind of the short and sweet, that's what the screenshot is, of kind of the key points, key quotes from customers. You can learn a little bit more about the organizations themselves. And then finally, an asset that we have, created by Forrester called the TEI checklist, in which it sort of lists off 10 things that might prompt you to want to continue on with a critical event management system or a mass notification system or whatever products you're leaning forward. So it's sort of like, if you can't do X or you need Y, maybe this is for you. So please check out all of those. And then also the customized ROI calculator, which is really, really exciting. And I will do a live demo in just a second. But it really is so simple. You insert your company name, your organization's annual revenue, how many employees you have, and how many physical locations. And then you're able to download the report for you. It really is that easy. So with that, I'm going to walk you through a live example of Wake Forest University. I chose this college because that is my alma mater, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I'm calling it Courtney's College because I'm the one making the business case. But you could call it whatever you want. These are the real revenue numbers I found at wakeforest.edu. These are the number of employees Wake has. And then physical locations, that's where it kind of gets I mean, you could plug in what you want for your organization. So I know Wake has a med school and a Charlotte campus and all the things. But I'm just picking the main university. And then I just hit See Results. And from there, we're able to estimate, OK, there's 120% return on investment if Everbridge were to use or sorry, if Wake Forest were to use Everbridge, and a net present value of almost $750,000, which is really exciting. And as I continue to scroll, you can see the customized inputs are in here with blue. So the key findings that don't have the little blue tab are the overall study findings that I talked about earlier. And then anything you see with the blue, it shows you that customized input. So that's really exciting. I highly encourage you to scroll around, play with this tool, and use it to support your business case. You can download it to your site, which I'm doing. There we go. And it shows, if you guys can see, it shows, you know, Customized for Me. So, as we keep going, that's kind of the top study. And then it shows the breakdown of your customized thing. And it, I'll just say, it says February 2023 because that's when we commissioned the original Total Economic Impact study. And then so that just helps you support your business case because it's up to date. So all this is really exciting. I will say as well, there are times when you might get a negative ROI. We left that in there rather than saying, please see, you know, please speak to an Everbridge employee because we wanted you to see, like well, first of all, sometimes maybe Everbridge isn't for you. But as an employee there, I think it is. And secondly, wanting to, like, get to the root of the question. So maybe, you know, CEM isn't for you. But maybe mass notification can be or or another product. And so if you get a negative ROI, don't be discouraged. Make sure your inputs are right. Like, for example, with Wake Forest, how they had three different locations, the number of employees like, if if you do what I did and said one location, you're going to have less employees there than if you said all three. And you're going to see less revenue from that one location than you would see from all three. So make sure your inputs are right for the use case that supports what you need. And then also make sure that, you're taking the data with a grain of salt, right? So, like, this is a composite organization. This is not a real person. This is a website talking to you. So Everbridge sales would be able to even further customize your use case and inputs. But it's a great place to start, a great way to build your business case. And just to reiterate, we have so many assets you can use, including the study, the infographic, the checklist, and then the customized ROI. So try it today. It's linked, and we'll make sure you get it. And if you have any questions, feel free to email Everbridge Sales or me personally at Courtney.Carlock@Everbridge.com. Thank you so much. Thank you, Courtney. Thank you, Zach. Great presentations. And we're now going to answer some of the questions that came in during the presentation. I encourage all of you in our audience to submit your questions. Both of our presenters have a lot of knowledge and experience. So now is the perfect time to tap into their expertise. So first question, help me understand more context around the study. Is this representative of the value of a campus? Is this representative of the value a campus would receive? And if you could explain the methodology and the types of risks that are similar between campuses and companies. Absolutely. Yeah. So a couple of questions in there. Hopefully, I'll remember to hit them all. If not, feel free to remind me. So this the original study, the first study, was built on four composite organizations or four real organizations to create a composite organization. So the methodology is maybe we're talking to Wake Forest. Maybe we're talking to, you know, University of Vermont. Maybe we're talking like, there's four different companies going in. And then the findings are conducted onto, like, a collaboration of all four. I'll say I think that we used four organizations, which may or may not have included college campuses as one of the four. But the events they're facing are likely the same, right? Like, if a hurricane's coming, it's going to affect both a college and a company. If there's a severe weather alert or an active shooter event or whatever the use cases is excuse me, the use cases are, they're going to be, very similar in a lot of ways so that the study can be relevant and tailored to you. But again, that's another reason to hop on the phone live if you're wondering about the differences between, what it can do for you and your campus versus, like, a corporate company. That's totally valid. But the study is relevant for both. So, if OK, I know you used a midsize university. What if my university is smaller or bigger? Yeah, that's a great question. That's the point, right? So you can go plug in your numbers and see. I know we played around with some California companies or sorry, colleges when we were looking at this. And we're getting different results for everything. So plug them in and see. The idea is that Everbridge is relevant to everyone at all times because the mission is to keep people safe and to, you know, anyone can be kept safe, especially with a software company. But plug it in. If the findings are negatives, like I mentioned, that can happen. That might just be an input error. Or it might be that this project is more tailored to our CEM suite, so our full big solution. And maybe you're hoping to start a little smaller, like what Zach mentioned, like just a mass notification product. How quickly will my university realize the impact and benefits of the return on investment calculator? Yeah. So this study showed the payback in a period of less than six months. I think that can be generalized to everyone because it was generalized to composite organizations, and real organizations. But you will get your own personalized payback period when you use the calculator. You know, this next question is for Zach. Zach, when you were at the University of Vermont and when you worked with other clients, how do college campuses determine the return on investment for something like a mass notification system or a, an emergency management system? Yeah, that can be really challenging. In a lot of cases, you know, you don't necessarily know until it happens. And you don't have it to sort of really justify it. You know, it's one of those things that I always sort of kept in the back of my head. Like, if I'm doing my job really well, and we, as a campus, are doing really good at mitigating hazards, am I putting myself out of work? Like, I'm going to start to appear less and less valuable if I get really, really good. So, you know, trying to capture any time there's a situation where, A, you've already purchased the system. And you want to, you know, continue to fund it. So you do your after-action reports. And, you know, you show, hey, you know, again, I'll just use mass notification. You know, we alert a bunch of people. We got feedback immediately that, like, hey, I made a good decision based on this. You know, it saved my life. Or, you know, I was able to avoid campus. Or something as simple as, like, hey, thanks. I knew campus was closed today because of this. And, you know, you saved me from having to go in. And I'm going to hang out and play video games. Like, there's all sorts of different ways that you can justify it. You know, testing and exercising it as well to sort of, you know, if you're in between those periods, where you, you know, you had a bunch of things that occurred. You managed to get the funding. And now there hasn't been a lot of stuff happening. You know, you should be that also means that your skills are kind of in a lull. So that might be a good opportunity to say, hey, I'm going to go exercise this. Or I'm going to get some additional training on this. And again, bring in your leadership to that. Doug just posted a question. I see, you know, like, yes, this is one of the justifications we use a lot was, like, how many zeros do you want to add at the end of the check before, when you're asking for this service, or after, when it doesn't go right? And Clery, I mean, anyone who's responsible for Clery, those are not small fines. So beyond, like, the obvious mission of, like, public safety and, you know, making sure timely warnings are going out and, you know, all that, there's also the case of, like, if you don't do this properly, there are just astronomical amounts of fines that you could receive and the negative publicity. You know, your reputational value is you, you know, trust is hard-fought, easy loss. So, you know, by screwing this up and not getting information out quickly or whatever, you're going to see that there is an immediate impact to the, you know, long-term longevity of this campus. So, you know, and you look especially, you know, it's a little bit less with universities. But, you know, school shootings, when those incidents occur, like, in many cases, those buildings are that's it. They're done. You've lost that school on top of the tons of impacts that go downstream, the trauma, the emotional impacts, you know, the impact on the community as a whole, whether it feels safe, whether people are going to move there. So there's these long, long, long, long, you know, downstream effects that you have to sort of track as well. So, yeah, it can be really hard to sort of show value, especially, you know, again, if you're not using it every single day, it can be really challenging. That's why I, especially with our mass notification system, I use it for everything. I got everyone signed up on it. I got our athletics department on it. So all the coaches and staff were getting notifications with weather. We didn't have an outdoor siren system. We used to use the Burlington Country Club's lightning siren was kind of how we would know that there was a storm in the area. And so we were like, OK, well, now we'll build this into our system. I'll pull all the NOAA alerts. And they'll get it immediately. And now they're compliant with the, you know, NCAA safety requirements and everything else. You know, there's a lot of different ways you can sort of go around doing it. But again, every single time I was, if I made an investment, and I was like, hey, this is working out really well. And everyone's like, we love this. I just did more and more to make it irreplaceable so that I didn't have to worry about justifying it ever again, so. Well, and that's kind of where it goes back to where you're weighing whether you should say how much better our campus is going to be versus seeing these examples that are maybe happening at different campuses in different parts of the country and how things went south, whether it's K-12 or higher ed, and see how damaging that was to the organization that it happened to. Well, and also, you brought up a really good point about, you know, when you use the mass notification systems often, you know, as long as you manage that in a way like, you know, I assuming you're putting people in groups so that. Yes, yeah. You know, they're not getting notifications for, like, ice cream socials and things like that. But, you know, really useful information so people won't, you know, opt out of your system, assuming that they're allowed to opt out, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The alert and warning component of our mass notification, the one that was actually sending out the critical information, we only used a handful of times a year, specifically so that if students, you know, got a text message, and then their phones start ringing, then they start looking around. And everyone else is getting a text message. And their phone starts ringing. And then all the digital displays are flipping over into the emergency alert that they would react to it. That's so fun. Yeah. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't noise. And so we were very specific in how we used our system for emergencies versus timely warnings versus nice-to-knows. And, you know, you it's like, with Everbridge, they have opt-ins, right? Like, you could build lists. And so if someone wants to be on the weather alert list, they could opt in on that. And they'll get more notifications than everyone else. But we really did try to keep, like, the very specific ones. And that's with, like, anything too, right? Like, you want to figure out, like, how do I justify so, like, an incident management system, like, we made an investment in an incident management system. And it was great for all the public safety people. But a lot of the people that we work with are office people. They just didn't know how to use it. So I was like, all right, well, how do I connect this to our Microsoft Teams? You know, is there a way that we can now share this? And so I was able to use, you know, figure out some ways to basically pull data out of one and put it in the other one, and, you know, working also with our legal team and figuring out, like, where's the master record for everything that we're doing? You know, where's that going to be? And how's that going to work? And so just, again, trying to meet everyone where they're at and then start to build that system in. So again, it becomes, I guess, like, an organic component of your response. And people will want to use it. It becomes less, you know, of an annoyance, because the minute it's annoying, people aren't going to use it. Then it loses all its value. If that starts, you know, the first month into your five, you know, three-five-year contract, then you're going to have a long slog to try to win people back. So as you're even, you know, developing your business case for this, you want to think, OK, if I'm going to get it, you know, I've got the funding secured. Everyone's on board. Our budget year is July 1. I'm going to have this thing up and running by August for the campus this year. I'm thinking, all right, again, I'll just use mass notification. We're going to do training the first week of August. We're going to do tests the second week of August. You know, we got Preparedness Month. So that's when we're going to do our campus-wide alert, you know, test. And we're going to explain to everyone why this is, you know, useful and get everyone signed up. And, you know, in December, I'm going to do it again before they leave to make sure that, you know, students who are departing, you know, are signed up. So when they come back, they'll know, you know, we live in a northern, although we have no snow this year. But, you know, one of the issues a lot of times is people would, they'd leave campus. And then all of a sudden, we get these huge snowstorms. They're like, do we come back to campus? Is it open right now? Like, when is it going to be open? Is it being delayed? You know, so again, I just try to plan out the entire year, and try to have, OK, if this is the new thing, how do I keep this relevant and going all the time? And that's really, like, what an emergency manager's job is. You're spinning plates all the time. So you just got to figure out how to keep that plate spinning. Thank you, Zach and Courtney. We ran out of time. For those of you in our audience whose questions we didn't get to today, they will respond individually to you after the presentation. We appreciate all of you in our audience. So thank you for attending. We also want to thank Everbridge for sponsoring this presentation. Be sure to visit them online at everbridge.com. If you want to watch this webcast again or share it with your peers, a recording will be available on campussafetymagazine.com tomorrow. We'd love to hear your feedback on this presentation. So please take a few minutes to complete our survey. It will pop up on your computer screen when you go to leave the webcast. So with that, thanks again for your attendance. And thank you again, Courtney and Zach, for presenting. Enjoy the rest of your day.