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City outlines Ready Notify plan, promises tighter quality checks after duplicate alerts
Summary
The city's communications director presented Ready Notify as the platform for community and emergency alerts, described opt-in and microtargeting capabilities, and pledged to work with the county and vendor to fix duplicate entries and improve message clarity.
David Sims, the city's director of communications, told the council the city will use the Ready Notify platform to deliver both emergency and non-emergency community messages and that the vendor's system meets FCC and telecommunications standards for high-volume delivery. "It's a 1-stop shop," Sims said, adding that Ready Notify supports voice and text and is designed to handle tens of thousands of messages.
Sims said the city will funnel community updates through the communications department for review and quality control; Debbie Palmer, who manages the city's Facebook and website content, will do an initial review, he said, and Sims will sign off before messages go out. He said about 4,000 Strongsville residents were signed up on the system at the time of the meeting and that text messages require explicit opt-in under FCC rules.
Council members pressed for clarity about approval workflows and microtargeting. One member said a recent alert tied to a Ward 1 incident did not reach all affected residents and asked how the city can ensure messages are targeted correctly. Sims said the city's sign-up list is specific to Strongsville and that the platform can target by streets or even by only a handful of phone numbers if requested. He acknowledged a data-quality problem that produced duplicate messages after a vendor transition and said the administration will coordinate with the county and OnSolve (the vendor) to clean the database at scale and to consider a short, targeted notice instructing residents how to correct multiple entries in their accounts.
Sims and council members also discussed weather alerts, which Sims said are routed through a special National Weather Service feed that notification systems are required to accept; residents control whether they receive weather notifications by opting into that category.
The council agreed to follow up: Sims said he would meet with the county and the vendor, report back to the committee on quality-control workflows for dispatch and communications, and circulate materials (QR-code cards and outreach) to increase sign-ups and reduce duplicate notifications.
The matter was closed for committee follow-up; no formal ordinance or contract was voted on during this segment.
