by Ed Miller
Connect in 2011: A Billion Messages Served
At Blackboard Connect, we’re proud to announce that we’ve reached a new milestone. While our competitors sometimes boast of sending millions of messages annually, we’ve set a new standard: in 2011, our clients – across all sectors in education, government and the private sector – used our mass notification service to send more than 1 billion messages.
Schools, universities, government agencies and businesses across the globe used Connect tools to warn of emergency situations, enhance teaching and learning, boost student engagement and retention, and increase employee awareness and efficiency. With our multilingual, multimodal platform, Blackboard Connect allows users to send messages faster and ensure relevancy to specific audiences. New features and services help users reach recipients via modes they are most likely to respond to including voice, text, social networks and more.
In fact, Blackboard Connect now serves over 28 million recipients at more than 6,500 client institutions. Over the past three years, we’ve delivered a minimum of 99.99 percent service uptime, so it’s no wonder that our clients have reported overall satisfaction rates of 95 percent or better each year.
Recently, the analyst firm Gartner issued its “Magic Quadrant” report for the emergency and mass notification service market. Gartner placed Blackboard Connect in the upper-left “Challenger” quadrant, and we’re pleased to have been rated highly for our ‘Ability to Execute’. Most importantly, we’re proud that Gartner recognized our exceptional speed of delivery, noting that our messages “came through faster than many other vendors.”
At the same time, Gartner’s review process began over a year ago, and is primarily based on the previous version of our mass notification service. Since then, we’ve released Blackboard Connect 5, which raises the bar for our industry even higher, with unmatched ease of use and powerful tools for matching the right audience with the right message. And with Connect 5 already receiving accolades, we’re confident that technology analysts and industry thought leaders alike will have plenty more positive comments to share in 2012.
Of course, the response we’re most gratified with is that of our clients, and the praise for Blackboard Connect 5 has been great:
- “I really like the groups feature for after school remediation, as we can let now let parents know if we are keeping their children for a few minutes after school so they don’t have to show up immediately after school.”– Chris Kozendorfer, bookkeeper at Prince William County School District, of Manassas, VA.
- “I think this new Connect 5 system is going to make it easier for someone like me who is not real technical with searching maps and drawing lines and borders. It’s going to make it a lot simpler to get the message out to the people in a timely manner.” — Leo Matrangula, chief of police for the Town of Bel Air located in Harford County, MD.
- “I’m really excited about the new things we can do, especially with piloting SMS features, as we know our students would prefer text messages over anything else.” – Alison Swickard, executive director of marketing/communications for Pikes Peak Community College, of Colorado Springs, CO.
