Verizon at Home

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Our guest blogger is Mike Weston, director of marketing operations for Verizon Enhanced Communities, the team that provides products and services to managers, developers and tenants of multi-family housing properties and planned residential communities.

As the 2012 hurricane season begins, it’s good to reflect for a moment about some of the really astonishing weather-related incidents that happened in 2011—the Groundhogs Day blizzard that slammed the Midwest and Northeast, dumping snow as far south as Dallas;  the rare 5.8 earthquake in central Virginia that caused the shutdown of two nuclear reactors; and who could forget Hurricane Irene, which wrought over $15 billion in damage to the Mid-Atlantic, New York and New England areas with its pounding rains and winds?

As a property manager or a condo board member at an MDU, the most valuable thing you can offer your residents is safety and security, and having a well-thought-out emergency communications plan is just one way to provide that benefit. What many MDU managers need to keep in mind is that if you  wait for an outbreak of wildfires,a tornado, or an approaching hurricane to prepare your plan, then you’re already too late. That is one of the key reasons many forward-thinking building administrators at FiOS properties nationwide rely on Verizon Concierge year-round.

One of the most popular features of Verizon Concierge is called Resident Alert, an easy–to-use feature that enables your staff to send emergency recordings to everyone listed in your resident database in the event of:

• Evacuation orders due to fire, flooding, storms or other catastrophes
• School closings
• Water or power outages, or other utility notifications
• Amber or Silver alerts
• Highway or traffic alerts when traffic to your property is being re-routed
• Other situations that require you to get the word out quickly and efficiently

A designated administrator can call a dedicated toll-free number to record a notification message, which will be sent to any or all of the numbers in your property database, such as home, wireless, work, and/or other emergency contact phone numbers for each resident. If a call goes unanswered, a message will be left.

The administrator can subsequently view reports to view delivery status after the calls have been sent. Additionally, messages can be filtered to go only to specific buildings and/or groups if the event only affects parts of a property. And finally, the administrator can also send out a follow-up notification to give residents the “all clear” when it’s safe to return to the property, or to provide additional instructions to the residents.

Verizon Concierge

So whether it’s hurricane season on the coast, winter in the Northeast, or storm season in the Midwest, your residents are counting on you to provide a comfortableand safe place to live. Part of that responsibility includes letting them know when it’s time to get out of harm’s way. For more information on how Verizon Concierge can help you plan for communicating with your residents, call 866-638-6066, or visit www.verizon.com/communities for more information.

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Thank you for this important reminder about disaster preparedness for the upcoming hurricane season.