Case Study: Fairfax County, Virginia Office of Emergency Management achieves faster, life‑saving community alerts and streamlined emergency communications with Everbridge

Improving Mass Communication with Everbridge

The National Capital Region (NCR) is a coalition of 18 sovereign jurisdictions across Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia serving more than five million residents. Faced with an aging notification system, NCR needed an easy-to-use, cloud-based critical communications platform that would let jurisdictions quickly send operational, incident and emergency messages to residents and coordinate across multiple agencies and stakeholders.

Everbridge provided a geo‑coded, multi‑channel cloud solution that could be managed from laptops or mobile devices and rolled out on a tight timeline. The platform made opt‑in and preference management simple, saved leaders time, and supported alerts ranging from weather and closures to reverse‑911 and CAD callbacks. In practice Everbridge helped notify roughly 99,000 people during a federal prisoner escape (leading to his capture) and reached about 80,000 residents during a missing‑person search that ended safely, and NCR is now exploring further community‑engagement features like Nixle and event opt‑ins.

Fairfax County, Virginia Office of Emergency Management

Sulayman Brown

Assistant Coordinator